The Storms of Jupiter

Create Software Tools That Help Us Predict and Quantify Jupiter's Atmospheric Flow.

Background

The planet Jupiter, or the father of the sky, is one of the gas giants in our solar system. A planet which may have no solid core whatsoever, Jupiter is the fifth planet from the Sun, and orbits about 778 million kilometers or 5.2 Astronomical Units (AU) from it (Earth is one AU from the Sun). Jupiter spins much faster than the Earth, with a rotational period of about 10 hours; and with a tilted axis of a mere 5 degrees, it spins nearly upright and thus has no seasons the way Earth and other planets do. Jupiter's fast rotation creates strong jet streams, separating its atmospheric clouds into dark belts and bright zones across long stretches. The several bands you can observe at different latitudes result in turbulence and storms along their interacting boundaries; similar in shape to the atmospheric storms and ocean eddies we see on Planet Earth.

Jupiter's tapestry of colorful cloud bands, swirls, and spots are comprised of cold, windy clouds of ammonia and water, floating in an atmosphere comprised mostly of hydrogen and helium. The gas planet likely has three distinct cloud layers in its "skies" that, taken together, span about 71 kilometers vertically. The top cloud is probably made of ammonia ice, while the middle layer is likely made of ammonium hydrosulfide crystals. The innermost layer may be made of water ice and vapor. The vivid colors you see in thick bands across Jupiter may be plumes of sulfur and phosphorus-containing gases rising from the planet's warmer interior.

A view of "The Dolphin of Jupiter" from the Juno spacecraft imaging at perijove (nearest planetary center), processed by Kevin M. Gill

With no solid surface to slow them down through shear, Jupiter's storms (seen as "spots") can persist for many years. Stormy Jupiter is swept by over a dozen prevailing winds, some reaching up to 540 km/h at the equator, 60 times more than the maximum speed of the Gulf Stream (9 km/h), and almost doubling the highest winds of Hurricane Maria (280 km/h). The Great Red Spot, a swirling oval of clouds twice as wide as Earth, has been observed on the giant planet for more than 300 years. Interestingly, three smaller ovals have recently merged to form the Little Red Spot, about half the size of its larger cousin. Scientists do not yet know if these ovals and planet-circling bands are shallow or deeply rooted to the interior.

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Solutions

In today's day and age, there are so many images available of Jupiter. Most recently, NASA's Space Probe Juno was able to take fascinating images of its continuously changing gas features, primarily its storms. These storms take the form of an eddy in the atmosphere; eddies on Earth, which are associated with water currents, have been continuously studied and much is known about their motion and properties. However, the eddies appearing on Jupiter are much more unfamiliar and mysterious.

From what satellites and probes have been able to capture, Jupiter's storm eddies are extremely violent, and have very fast translational and rotational speeds. Additionally, the different eddies form close to each other and they are often times very long lasting. Studying the eddies has posed quite an issue because spacecrafts and satellites are not always able to send images of the same eddies over short intervals of time. However there are so many remote sensing images now available of the various eddies that we hope that by using some great new and innovative technologies we may be able to provide:

1. Basic metrics of the storms such as location, time, date, diameter, direction of rotation (CW or ACW), rotation speed, propagation speed, eddy nonlinearity (swirl speed/propagation speed), age, and lifetime.

2. Prediction of the pathway of the storm based on consecutive available imagery and machine learning

Some possible solutions could include:

• Eddy statistics tool measuring important data. (e.g. propagation speed, rotation speed, radius, lifetime, etc).

• Eddy prognosticator tool predicting/simulating the path of an eddy.

• A "deep dream" storm generator. Can we train a deep learning neural network using drone imagery to predict or "imagine" storms in Jupiter's atmosphere?

• Anything else you can think of!

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Resources

• Kevin M. Gill's Twitter account: Kevin Gill is a software engineer and data wrangler at NASA-JPL and posts all kinds of 2D and 3D image processing from NASA missions.

• Seán Doran's Twitter account: Citizen scientist Seán Doran does a great deal of image processing and posts it online.

• NASAview tool (https://pds.nasa.gov/tools/about/pds3-tools/nasa-view.shtml): Tool to open a wide variety of IMG files. Example: Unzip coiss_1008.tar.gz.part, drag files from coiss_1008 > data > any of the folders > load one of the lbl files into NASAview with File - Open Object and selecting the desired .lbl file

• Equatorial radius Jupiter 71492 ± 4 km

• Equatorial radius Jupiter 66854 ± 10 km

• [Fluid dynamics package for Blender] (https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/physics/fluid/types/domain.html)

• [A tutorial for the fluid dynamics package] (https://www.pluralsight.com/blog/tutorials/setting-first-blender-fluid-simulation)

Datasets

• Cassini raw imaging of Jupiter: Imagery from the Planetary Data System at JPL.

• Juno raw imaging of Jupiter: Imagery from the Planetary Data System at JPL.

• Juno processed imaging of Jupiter: Imagery from NASA JPL. Includes the 'dolphin' in the clouds between 32 S and 59 S, Perijove 17 polar orbit on Dec 21st 2018, a closer look at a southern cloud, a north equatorial cloud at 14N on Oct 29th 2018.

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Challenge owner: David Lindo

Challenge contributors: Serena DiLeonardo and Andreas Antoniades