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The newspaper of The Johns Hopkins University May 27, 2008 | Vol. 37 No. 36
 
Storm Winds Blow Like Crazy in Jupiter's Little Red Spot

By Michael Buckley
Applied Physics Laboratory

Using data from NASA's New Horizons spacecraft and two telescopes at Earth, an international team of scientists has found that one of the solar system's largest and newest storms — Jupiter's Little Red Spot, or LRS — has some of the highest wind speeds ever detected on any planet.

New Horizons researchers combined observations from their Pluto-bound spacecraft, which flew past Jupiter in February 2007; data from the Hubble Space Telescope orbiting Earth; and the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope, perched on an Atacama Desert mountain in Chile. This is the first time that high-resolution, close-up imaging of the Little Red Spot has been combined with powerful Earth-orbital and ground-based imagery made at ultraviolet through mid- infrared wavelengths.

Jupiter's LRS is an anticyclone, a storm whose winds circulate in the direction opposite to that of a cyclone — counterclockwise, in this case. It is nearly the size of Earth and as red as the similar but larger and more-well-known Great Red Spot, or GRS. The dramatic evolution of the LRS began with the merger of three smaller white storms that had been observed since the 1930s. Two of these storms coalesced in 1998, and the combined pair merged with a third major Jovian storm in 2000. In late 2005 — for reasons still unknown — the combined storm turned red.

The new observations confirm that wind speeds in the LRS have increased substantially over those in the precursor storms, which had been observed in past decades by NASA's Voyager and Galileo missions. Researchers measured the latest wind speeds and directions using two image mosaics from New Horizons' telescopic Long Range Reconnaissance Imager, taken 30 minutes apart, in order to track the motion of cloud features. New Horizons obtained the images from a distance of approximately 1.5 million miles from Jupiter at a resolution of 8.9 miles per pixel. The LRS' maximum wind speeds of about 384 mph far exceed the 156 mph threshold that would make it a Category 5 storm on Earth.

"This storm is still developing, and some of the changes remain mysterious," said Andrew Cheng of Johns Hopkins' Applied Physics Laboratory, who led the study team. "This unique set of observations is giving us hints about the storm's structure and makeup; from this, we expect to learn much more about how these large atmospheric disturbances form on worlds across the solar system."

Jupiter's venerable Great Red Spot has decreased steadily in size over the past several decades. In addition, a rare "global upheaval" in Jupiter's atmosphere began before New Horizons visited last year. This upheaval involved the disappearance of activity in the South Equatorial Belt (which left the GRS as an isolated storm), the appearance of a south tropical disturbance north of the Little Red Spot and other spectacular cloud changes.

"This was a rare opportunity to combine observations from a powerful suite of instruments, as Jupiter will not be visited again by a spacecraft until 2016 at the earliest," said Cheng, whose team publishes its work in the June Astronomical Journal.

Scientists combined Long Range Reconnaissance Imager maps of cloud motions with visible-color images from Hubble and mid-infrared images from the Very Large Telescope. The latter technique allows scientists to "see" thermal structure and dynamics beneath the visible cloud layers because thermal infrared wavelengths (indicating heat) can pass through the higher clouds.

"The new observations confirm that the thermal structures, wind speeds and cloud features of the LRS are very similar to those of the GRS," said Hal Weaver, a member of the study team from APL and the New Horizons project scientist. "Both the LRS and the GRS extend into the stratosphere, to far higher altitudes than for the smaller storms on Jupiter."

The observations offer clues to the mystery of why the GRS, and now also the LRS, may be so red. The wind speeds and overall strength of the LRS increased substantially in the seven years between the Galileo and New Horizons observations, during which the storm became red. "This supports the idea that a common dynamical mechanism explains the reddening of the two largest anticyclonic systems on Jupiter, one possibility of which is that storm winds dredge up material from below," said Amy Simon-Miller of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.

In their report, the scientists also wonder about the future of Jupiter's two giant storms. The LRS already rivals the steadily shrinking GRS in size and wind speed. The new thermal and wind field observations hint at an interaction between the south tropical disturbance, the Little Red Spot and a warm cyclonic region south of the LRS, forming a complex that could dwarf the Great Red Spot.

"The Great Red Spot may not always be the largest and strongest storm on Jupiter," said Glenn Orton of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "Continued monitoring of Jupiter's constantly evolving atmosphere will surely yield more surprises."

New Horizons is the first mission in NASA's New Frontiers Program of medium-class spacecraft exploration projects. Alan Stern leads the mission and science team as principal investigator; APL manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate.

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