The Thermal Structure and Composition of Jupiter's Great Red Spot From JWST/MIRI

Creators: Harkett, Jake¹; Fletcher, Leigh N.¹; King, Oliver R. T.¹; Roman, Michael T.¹; Melin, Henrik¹; Hammel, Heidi B.²; Hueso, Ricardo³; Sánchez‐Lavega, Agustín³; Wong, Michael H.⁴; Milam, Stefanie N.⁵; Orton, Glenn S.⁶; de Kleer, Katherine⁷; Irwin, Patrick G. J.⁸; de Pater, Imke⁴; Fouchet, Thierry⁹; Rodríguez‐Ovalle, Pablo⁹; Fry, Patrick M.¹⁰; Showalter, Mark R.¹¹

1. University of Leicester
2. Association of Universities For Research In Astronomy
3. University of the Basque Country
4. University of California, Berkeley
5. Goddard Space Flight Center
6. Jet Propulsion Lab
7. California Institute of Technology
8. University of Oxford
9. Laboratory of Space Studies and Instrumentation in Astrophysics
10. University of Wisconsin–Madison
11. Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence

Abstract

Jupiter's Great Red Spot (GRS) was mapped by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST)/Mid‐Infrared Instrument (4.9–27.9 m) in July and August 2022. These observations took place alongside a suite of visual and infrared observations from; Hubble, JWST/NIRCam, Very Large Telescope/VISIR and amateur observers which provided both spatial and temporal context across the jovian disc. The stratospheric temperature structure retrieved using the NEMESIS software revealed a series of hot‐spots above the GRS. These could be the consequence of GRS‐induced wave activity. In the troposphere, the temperature structure was used to derive the thermal wind structure of the GRS vortex. These winds were only consistent with the independently determined wind field by JWST/NIRCam at 240 mbar if the altitude of the Hubble‐derived winds were located around 1,200 mbar, considerably deeper than previously assumed. No enhancement in ammonia was found within the GRS but a link between elevated aerosol and phosphine abundances was observed within this region. North‐south asymmetries were observed in the retrieved temperature, ammonia, phosphine and aerosol structure, consistent with the GRS tilting in the north‐south direction. Finally, a small storm was captured north‐west of the GRS that displayed a considerable excess in retrieved phosphine abundance, suggestive of vigorous convection. Despite this, no ammonia ice was detected in this region. The novelty of JWST required us to develop custom‐made software to resolve challenges in calibration of the data. This involved the derivation of the "FLT‐5" wavelength calibration solution that has subsequently been integrated into the standard calibration pipeline.

Copyright and License

© 2024. The Author(s). This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Acknowledgement

We would like to thank David Law of the JWST support team for his incredible work generating new wavelength-calibration solutions as well as his patience in answering numerous questions. Additionally, we are grateful to the GTO and ERS 1373 teams for their expertise and numerous helpful discussions. We also appreciate the detailed and high-quality feedback from two anonymous reviewers. Jake Harkett was supported by an STFC studentship. Leigh N. Fletcher, Oliver R.T. King and Michael T. Roman were supported by a European Research Council Consolidator Grant (under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, grant agreement No. 723890). Henrik Melin was supported by the STFC JWST Fellowship (ST/W001527/1). Pablo Rodríguez-Ovalle was supported by a Université Paris-Cité contract. Thierry Fouchet was supported by the Grant ANR-21-CE49-0020-01. Ricardo Hueso and Agustín Sánchez-Lavega were supported by grant PID2019-109467GB-I00 funded by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033/ and were also supported by Grupos Gobierno Vasco IT1742-22. Part of this research was carried out at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (80NM0018D0004). This work is based on observations made with the NASA/ESA/CSA JWST. The data were obtained from the MAST at the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., under NASA contract NAS 5–03127 for JWST. These observations are associated with programme 1246, led by PI; Leigh N. Fletcher and programme 1373, led by co-PIs; Imke de Pater and Thierry Fouchet. Hubble observations were made as part of OPAL/WFCJ programme: GO16790 (PIs: Michael H. Wong, Amy A. Simon) and the amateur ground-based observations were made by Isao Miyazaki. VLT observations were collected at the European Southern Observatory under ESO programme 108.223F.001. For the post-processing of the MIRI data, this research used the ALICE High Performance Computing Facility at the University of Leicester. For the purpose of open access, the author has applied a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license to the Author Accepted Manuscript version arising from this submission.

Data Availability

Level-3 calibrated GRS MIRI/MRS data (GTO 1246) from the standard pipeline are available directly from the MAST archive (MAST Archive, 2023). The Hubble observations used for comparison were acquired by the OPAL/WFC3 programme (OPAL Archive, 2024). The position of the GRS was estimated based on amateur observer submissions to PVOL (Hueso, 2024). The visual context observations taken on 2022-08-15 were made by Isao Miyazaki. An archive of amateur images of Jupiter including the one used in this study can be found online (Miyazaki, 2024). The PICV3 software used to derive GRS wind velocities from the NIRCam data is available to download (Hueso, 2020). The ACCIV software used to derive GRS wind velocities from the HST data is also available to download (Asay-Davis, 2024). The NEMESIS suite of radiative transfer and spectral inversion software (Irwin et al., 2008) is open-access and available for download (Irwin, 2022). The JWST calibration pipeline is available as a Python module (Bushouse et al., 2023). Version 1.11.4. was used for this study. The bespoke pipeline and data processing code developed during this study are available to download (King et al., 2024). The PlanetMapper software used to assign longitude and latitude grids to the VLT/VISIR and ground-based amateur data can be found online (King & Fletcher, 2023). The data products produced in this study and the code used to generate these products are available online (Harkett, 2024).

Supplemental Material

Supporting Information S1: https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/action/downloadSupplement?doi=10.1029%2F2024JE008415&file=2024JE008415-sup-0001-Supporting+Information+SI-S01.pdf

Files

JGR Planets - 2024 - Harkett - The Thermal Structure and Composition of Jupiter s Great Red Spot From JWST MIRI.pdf

Files (15.6 MB)

Name	Size	Download all
2024je008415-sup-0001-supporting information si-s01.pdf md5:53f25bd21f6896d2ec3d5166234310a4	4.8 MB	Preview Download
JGR Planets - 2024 - Harkett - The Thermal Structure and Composition of Jupiter s Great Red Spot From JWST MIRI.pdf md5:6474ea35f7422d9169f485d6495d3e35	10.9 MB	Preview Download

Additional details

	All versions	This version
Views	0	0
Downloads	0	0
Data volume	0 Bytes	0 Bytes