Jupiter has a cold vortex in the upper atmosphere over
its north pole resembling the vortex over Earth’s south
pole that enables depletion of Earth’s stratospheric ozone,
images from two NASA telescopes show.
Composite versions of the images, which resemble cats’
eyes, are available online at
http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA03864 with an
explanatory description. Dr. Glenn Orton, an astronomer at
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.,
presented them today at the annual meeting of the American
Astronomical Society’s Division of Planetary Sciences, in
Birmingham, Ala.
A cold air mass, that maintains a roughly hexagonal
shape, extends vertically from Jupiter’s stratosphere down
into the next-lower layer of the atmosphere and rotates at
a rate that takes about 300 days to complete a full circle.
Scientists can refine models of how Earth’s atmosphere
works by comparisons with atmospheric dynamics on other
planets, such as Jupiter.
Orton and other researchers obtained the images with
the JPL-built Wide Field and Planetary Camera on NASA’s
Hubble Space Telescope and with JPL’s Mid-Infrared Large-
Well Imager on NASA’s Infrared Telescope Facility.
The Hubble Space Telescope is managed by the Space
Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, Md. The Space
Telescope Science Institute is operated by the Association
of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc. (AURA), for
NASA, under contract with the Goddard Space Flight Center,
Greenbelt, Md. The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of
international cooperation between NASA and the European
Space Agency (ESA). The Infrared Telescope Facility is
operated by the University of Hawaii, Honolulu, under a
cooperative agreement with NASA. The California Institute
of Technology, Pasadena, manages JPL for NASA.
