PREVIOUS TALK
Juno Update at Jupiter: What’s happening to the Great Red Spot?
OCTOBER 15 at 7pm
The giant planet Jupiter is recognized by its orange and white stripes – and its Great Red Spot. A large red storm has been observed by modest telescopes in Jupiter’s atmosphere for centuries. In 1979 the Voyager spacecraft made movies of the GRS that was about the size of two Earths with hurricane-scale winds that circulated in 6 days. NASA’s Juno spacecraft has been in orbit around Jupiter since 4th July 2016 and made over 30 orbits over Jupiter’s poles. In the past year Juno made some passes close to the GRS, measuring the depth of the storm and observing the turbulent atmospheric structures.
In this talk, LASP scientist Dr. Fran Bagenal will show how Jupiter’s Great Red Spot has been observed by telescopes on Earth as well as from spacecraft near Jupiter. The storm has noticeably shrunk in size over the past 40 years – will it disappear? Grow back to its size at the Voyager epoch?
Biography: Dr. Fran Bagenal is a research scientist at the University of Colorado. She is co-investigator and team leader of the plasma investigations on NASA’s Juno mission to Jupiter. Her main area of expertise is the study of charged particles trapped in planetary magnetic fields and the interaction of plasmas with the atmospheres of planetary objects, particularly in the outer solar system. Born and raised in the UK, Dr. Bagenal received her bachelor degree in Physics and Geophysics from the University of Lancaster, England, and her doctorate degree in Earth and Planetary Sciences from MIT (Cambridge, Mass) in 1981. She spent five years as a postdoctoral researcher at Imperial College, London, before returning to the United States for research and faculty positions in Boulder, Colorado. She has participated in several of NASA's planetary exploration missions, including Voyager 1 and 2, Galileo, Deep Space 1, New Horizons and Juno.
