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| Jason Major, a citizen scientist, used information from the JunoCam imager on NASA's Juno mission to produce this enhanced-color image of Jupiter's Great Red Spot. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/Jason Major) |
Large storms accompany massive planets. A brand-new citizen science project on Zooniverse is centered on these storms on Jupiter. To assist scientists in their quest for storms on the biggest planet in our solar system, Jovian Vortex Hunter(opens in new tab) was released on Tuesday, June 21.
The project, led by postdoctoral researcher Ramanakumar Sankar at the University of Minnesota, mines data from NASA's Juno spacecraft and "aims at studying the different types of clouds that form on Jupiter, in order to better understand how the atmosphere of the largest planet in the solar system," he wrote in a blog post.
Nearly six years have passed since Juno first arrived on the massive planet (it arrived on July 4, 2016). Its JunoCam initiative already enables amateur scientists to improve the spacecraft's raw pictures. According to Sankar, the new initiative will concentrate on the vortices that occur in Jupiter's cloud tops and are the subject of several unanswered concerns by scientists regarding their genesis and evolution.
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| Citizen scientist Kevin M. Gill created this image of Jupiter using data from the spacecraft’s JunoCam imager. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/Kevin M. Gill) |
"We know very little about why clouds in vortices have so many different hues. Is it a result of the makeup of the atmosphere? Or do the clouds have varied colors because they are developing at different altitudes, where pressure and temperature have an impact on the crystalline structure?"
By asking project members to record the locations where vortices are forming, which aids physicists in understanding their genesis, the researchers hope to address these issues.
According to Sankar, the initiative aims to create a collection of various vortices and "connect them with the underlying physics/chemistry of the place that they occur in." We could discover so much about the Jovian environment and the mechanisms forming the magnificent clouds we see with your assistance, he said.
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