Jovian Vortex Hunter: the Zooniverse project to learn more about Jupiter's clouds

Jupiter's atmosphere is much like ours: there are clouds of different shapes and sizes. On Jupiter, most of the clouds are made of chemicals other than water, and can be several thousand kilometers in size. Some clouds are also created from powerful storms that are over 50 kilometers/30 miles in height and hundreds of kilometers across. Figuring out how these clouds form is very important for understanding Jupiter's atmosphere, and the processes create the amazing features that we see.

Why study jovian clouds?

The different clouds on Jupiter form in different atmospheric conditions (e.g., storms, vortices), similar to how we get different types of clouds when the atmosphere is calm, or stormy. The types of clouds on Jupiter are also highly dependent on the chemical that forms them. Jupiter has three main cloud layers: ammonia clouds are mostly the ones which we can see since they form at the very top, followed by a layer of ammonium hydrosulfide (a key ingredient in stink bombs, so these clouds are not the best smelling!). Deep in the atmosphere (about 150 kilometers/100 miles below the ammonia clouds), we will find thick water clouds.

In order to understand how these different clouds form, we need to look at the diversity of the cloud features in the jovian atmosphere. In this project, we will create that catalogue and group together the different cloud features from JunoCam images.

What are vortices?

Here, we are mainly interested in vortices, which are clouds that forms in features that have a round/elliptical shape, like hurricanes. We are interested in the physics behind why they come in different shapes and sizes. Anti-cylones (have a "negative vorticity" and rotate clockwise in the northern hemisphere and anti-clockwise in the southern hemisphere) and cyclones (spin anti-clockwise in the northern hemisphere and clockwise in the southern) have very different colors and shapes. Here are some examples of vortices:

In this project, you will help us categorize these different clouds based on shape and color:

What do we want to learn from this project?

We want to answer these main questions:

What is the diversity of cloud structures associated with vortical phenomenon on Jupiter?

• Is there a difference in diversity between cyclonic and anticylonic features, i.e., are cyclonic cloud features much more diverse in color than anticyclones?
• For cyclonic features specifically, what are the different cloud structures possible? Are we limited to red, white and brown cores?
• How are brown barges (elongated cyclones that have a deep brown color) different from other cyclonic features? Are there non-brown barges?

What leads to the diversity?

• Are specific cloud features tied to underlying dynamics, e.g., do brown cyclones only form in certain shear conditions?
• What can we infer about the atmospheric composition, as it pertains to the color of the cloud? Can we use this to draw a distribution of composition with location?

This catalogue will be passed through a neural network to identify characteristics that are shared by these features, in order to understand the underlying physics of what causes and drives them.

Juno and the JunoCam instrument

In this project, you will be looking at images from the JunoCam camera on board the Juno spacecraft. Juno was launched in 2011, and reached Jupiter in 2016, and has been collecting data ever since.

Juno is in a highly elliptical orbit around Jupiter, coming as close as a few thousand kilometers above the cloud tops during its closest approach and going several millions of kilometers away from Jupiter in its apoapsis (farthest point in its orbit). Each close approach (called a perijove) has the spacecraft approach over the north pole, reach its closest point near the midlatitudes and move out from Jupiter over the south pole:

Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech

During these close approaches, the JunoCam instrument takes extremely high resolution images of the jovian atmosphere, which allow us to study the atmospheric dynamics of the giant planet. To see a simulated view of what Juno would see, check out this video from the 27th perijove pass, which has been sped up to cover roughly two hours of the orbit:

How you can help

In this project, we cut out small segments of images from JunoCam and are interested in cataloguing the different features that exist in the jovian atmosphere. Some examples of these cutouts are shown below, where you can see the diversity of the color and shapes of different features:

JunoCam has completed more than 40 orbits around Jupiter, and we have a collection of about 60,000 images like the ones above. We need your help to identify which images have vortices, where they are and how they appear. With the catalogue of features (particularly vortices) in place, we can study the physics behind how these features form, and how they are related to the structure of the atmosphere, particularly below the clouds, where we cannot directly observe them. We hope you can help us in unraveling these mysteries!
Thank you!