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Published June 2020 | Accepted Version + Supplemental Material
Journal Article Open

The water abundance in Jupiter's equatorial zone

Abstract

Oxygen is the most common element after hydrogen and helium in Jupiter's atmosphere, and may have been the primary condensable (as water ice) in the protoplanetary disk. Prior to the Juno mission, in situ measurements of Jupiter's water abundance were obtained from the Galileo probe, which dropped into a meteorologically anomalous site. The findings of the Galileo probe were inconclusive because the concentration of water was still increasing when the probe ceased sending data. Here we report on the water abundance in the equatorial region (0 to 4 degrees north latitude), based on data taken at 1.25 to 22 GHz from the Juno microwave radiometer, probing pressures of approximately 0.7 to 30 bar. Because Juno discovered the deep atmosphere to be surprisingly variable as a function of latitude, it remains to confirm whether the equatorial abundance represents Jupiter's global water abundance. The water abundance at the equatorial region is inferred to be 2.5^(+2.2)_(−1.6) ppm, or 2.7^(+2.4_(−1.7) times the elemental ratio of protosolar oxygen to hydrogen (1σ uncertainties). If this reflects the global water abundance, the result suggests that the planetesimals that formed Jupiter were unlikely to have been water-rich clathrate hydrates.

Additional Information

© 2020 Springer Nature Limited. Received 23 July 2019; Accepted 02 January 2020; Published 10 February 2020. The research was carried out at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The Juno mission and the team members at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory were supported by NASA grant NNN12AA01C. T.G. acknowledges support from CNRS. We thank all Juno team members for the collaborative efforts. Data availability: Juno MWR data can be accessed on the Planetary Data System (PDS) https://pds.nasa.gov/. Requests for all other data or materials that are presented in the paper but not archived in the PDS should be addressed to C.L. Author Contributions: C.L. developed the inversion software and performed the data analysis. All authors discussed the results and commented on the manuscript. The authors declare no competing interests.

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Accepted Version - 2012.10305.pdf

Supplemental Material - 41550_2020_1009_Fig10_ESM.jpg.webp

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August 22, 2023
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