Donald Savage

Headquarters, Washington, DC September 8, 2000

(Phone: 202/358-1547)

Guy Webster
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA
(Phone: 818/354-6278)

RELEASE: 00-138

COMPUTER SIMULATION REVEALS UPS AND DOWNS OF JUPITER'S

WINDS

Waves of up-and-down winds that span great ranges in air

pressure may explain the surprisingly clear, dry areas near
Jupiter's equator, new research based on data from NASA's Galileo
entry probe indicates.

Scientists have been trying to understand the stability of these

clear "hot spots" ever since the probe plunged into one of them
nearly five years ago.

"If you could ride in a balloon coming into one of the hot spots,
you would experience a vertical drop of 100 kilometers (about 62
miles) -- more than 10 times the height of Mount Everest,"
explained Dr. Andrew Ingersoll, a Galileo science team member at
the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

An explanation of how these deep holes in Jupiter's clouds could

persist is reported in today's edition of the journal Science by
Dr. Adam Showman, of NASA's Ames Research Center, Moffett Field,
CA, and Dr. Timothy Dowling, director of the University of
Louisville's Comparative Planetology Laboratory in Kentucky.

"This helps answer one of the big puzzles we ended up with after
the probe entry," said Dr. Torrence Johnson, Galileo project
scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA.

Showman and Dowling propose that air moving west to east just
north of Jupiter's equator is also moving dramatically up and down
every few days. Water and ammonia vapors condense into clouds in
Jupiter's white equatorial plumes as the vapors rise. Then the
wrung-out air drops, forming the clear patches. After crossing
those hot spots, the air rises again and returns to its normal
cloudy state.
The researchers developed a computer simulation that recreates
known traits of the hot spots and plumes when the simulation
starts with a large-scale pressure difference. Dowling said
smaller pressure differences do not produce stable patterns.
"There are no wimpy hot spots, only strong ones," he quipped.

During the Galileo probe's hour-long descent on Dec. 7, 1995, it

returned the only direct measurements ever made from within
Jupiter's atmosphere. Scientists quickly realized the entry point
was a special place. On a planet mostly wrapped in high clouds,
the probe hit the southern rim of a clear spot where infrared
radiant energy from the planet's interior shines through.

The computer simulation reveals that the probe's entry site is

probably even more unusual than previously thought. Both the probe
and the computer model show that the head winds on the southern
rim of a hot spot get stronger and stronger with depth into the
planet. But in the model, this trend is reversed on the northern
rim. "These results underscore the importance of future multi-
probe missions to Jupiter," said Dowling.

The hot spots were known previously, but their depth was a
surprise, noted Ingersoll. A better name for them might be bright
spots, since the temperature at their visible depth is only about
32 degrees Fahrenheit (zero Celsius), though that is relatively
balmy compared to the neighborhood of minus 200 degrees Fahrenheit
(minus 130 degrees Celsius) at surrounding cloud tops.

Each hot spot is about the size of North America and lasts for
months. The hot spots alternate with larger cloudy plumes in a
band near Jupiter's equator. In some ways, the dry areas where
wrung-out air masses are descending resemble subtropical deserts
on earth, Ingersoll said. But, unlike Earth, Jupiter has no firm
surface to stop the air's fall.

All the hot spots combined make up less than one percent of
Jupiter's global area, but understanding how they remain stable is
important for understanding the whole planet's atmospheric
dynamics, Dowling said.

Also, the hot spots have "mathematical cousins" in some equatorial

movements in Earth's oceans and atmosphere, he said. "How
distantly or closely related they are is a question we are just
beginning to study."
The Galileo mission includes an orbiter that has been studying
Jupiter and its moons since it finished relaying information from
the atmospheric probe nearly five years ago. The mission is
managed by JPL for NASA's Office of Space Science, Washington,
D.C. JPL is a division of the California Institute of Technology.

Images of a Jupiter hot spot and information on the Galileo

mission are available at:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/pictures/jupiter

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