A team from the Laboratory of Atmospheric and Planetary Physics at the University of Liege used NASA's Juno spacecraft to resolve fine-scale features in Ganymede's auroras for the first time.
The LPAP team reconstructed the overall shape of Ganymede's ultraviolet aurora from a set of narrow strips acquired as Juno swept quickly past the moon.
Juno has been orbiting Jupiter since 2016.
Michela Muñoz cited Juno as an example of technological advances from exploration, noting that Juno took five years to reach Jupiter and became the first solar-powered spacecraft to operate at that distance.
Handheld controllers in the JUNO VR system support free roaming inside the detector model so users can inspect internal structures and event features at close range.
The VR application for the JUNO detector preserves high-precision geometric details for tens of thousands of photomultiplier tubes while converting offline data into interactive scenes.
The research team for the JUNO VR project is led by Yu-Mei Zhang and Zheng-Yun You.
The JUNO VR system presents inverse beta decay events with temporal correlation between positron and neutron signals including a characteristic delay of about 170 microseconds between the prompt and delayed components.
The JUNO VR display reconstructs high-energy cosmic muon events by showing muon tracks crossing the detector volume and associated energy deposition patterns.
A high-performance particle system in the JUNO VR application simulates photon propagation paths in real time to show how light generated by interactions travels through the detector.
The JUNO VR system is being applied to detailed analyses of neutrino signal events and searches for rare signatures that may reveal new phenomena.
Users of the JUNO VR system can replay event evolutions at nanosecond-level increments to inspect timing structures and spatial correlations.
Similar inverted V electron spectra have been observed at Jupiter by NASA’s Juno spacecraft, linking Jupiter’s powerful auroras to comparable acceleration signatures.
The Juno mission extension approved in 2021 placed Juno on a new trajectory that produced occultation opportunities behind Jupiter from Earth's perspective.
When Juno passed behind Jupiter from Earth's perspective, the spacecraft's radio signal was blocked and bent by Jupiter's atmosphere.
By tracking how Juno's radio signals bent through Jupiter's atmosphere, the researchers reconstructed temperature and density profiles used to map Jupiter's size and shape.
Juno Principal Investigator Scott J. Bolton is affiliated with the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, Texas.
The Weizmann Institute research group led by senior staff scientist Eli Galanti converted Juno radio occultation events into a refined global figure for Jupiter.
The study published in Nature Astronomy replaces six Voyager and Pioneer measurements with 26 radio occultation passes by NASA's Juno spacecraft.
Kaspi and former group member Nimrod Gavriel used Juno observations of polar cyclone motion to estimate how far Jupiter's polar cyclones extend into the planet's interior.