NASA’s Juno spacecraft has been orbiting the Jovian system for the past few years, taking photos and taking measurements of the solar system’s largest planet. Juno recently reached the end of its pre-planned mission, but NASA renewed it for a few more years. There is a lot to see on and around Jupiter, such as the asteroid impact that Juno captured in 2020.
Jupiter is a massive planet with corresponding massive gravity. As such, it is hit by a lot of space debris. However, Rohini Giles of the Southwest Research Institute says most of these small impacts are small and so short-lived that it is unusual to see them. Giles is the lead author of a new study published in Geophysical Research Letters, which sets out the case for this rare impact detection.
According to Giles, the bright flash of late 2020 stood out in the data. Juno spent a lot of time scanning Jupiter’s powerful magnetic field and aurorae, but the flash on April 10, 2020 had a different spectral signature. It lasted only 17 milliseconds, but it was much longer than Transient Luminous Events (TLEs) commonly found in Jupiter’s upper atmosphere. The spectral properties were also quite different, as indicated by the probe’s Ultraviolet Spectrograph (UVS).
The conclusion Giles’ team comes to is that this bright flash (shown above) comes from an asteroid or comet that fell into Jupiter’s atmosphere and exploded while it was heating up. Based on the brightness of the flash, the team estimated that the object has a mass of 249 to 1,496 kilograms, making it too small to leave marks on the gas giant. In 1994, the comet Shoemaker-Levy struck Jupiter 9, but it is more than a kilometer away. Teams that followed the impact found visible scars and X-ray releases that lasted months.
This impact can have huge effects on even large planets. Fifteen years after Shoemaker-Levy 9, the object was still responsible for 95 percent of the water in Jupiter’s stratosphere. If the unnamed 2020 impact causes local consequences, Juno could not detect it. However, Juno still has a few years to keep an eye out for more space rocks penetrating the planet.
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