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Published June 16, 2017 | Published
Journal Article Open

The distribution of ammonia on Jupiter from a preliminary inversion of Juno Microwave Radiometer data

Abstract

The Juno microwave radiometer measured the thermal emission from Jupiter's atmosphere from the cloud tops at about 1 bar to as deep as a hundred bars of pressure during its first flyby over Jupiter (PJ1). The nadir brightness temperatures show that the Equatorial Zone is likely to be an ideal adiabat, which allows a determination of the deep ammonia abundance in the range 362^(+33)_(-33) ppm. The combination of Markov chain Monte Carlo method and Tikhonov regularization is studied to invert Jupiter's global ammonia distribution assuming a prescribed temperature profile. The result shows (1) that ammonia is depleted globally down to 50–60 bars except within a few degrees of the equator, (2) the North Equatorial Belt is more depleted in ammonia than elsewhere, and (3) the ammonia concentration shows a slight inversion starting from about 7 bars to 2 bars. These results are robust regardless of the choice of water abundance.

Additional Information

© 2017 American Geophysical Union. Received 20 FEB 2017; Accepted 15 MAY 2017; Accepted article online 25 MAY 2017; Published online 3 JUN 2017. The research was carried out at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. C.L. was supported by a NASA Earth and Space Science Fellowship and by the NASA Postdoctoral Fellowship. The Juno mission and the team members at JPL were supported by NASA grant NNN12AA01C. We thank all Juno team members for the collaborative efforts. We note that Juno MWR data can be accessed on the Planetary Data System (PDS) https://pds.nasa.gov/.

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August 21, 2023
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