Jupiter in 2023/24:  Report no.4:   Jupiter at PJ57; a pair of impacts; and a 50^th aniversary.

John Rogers (BAA) (2024 March 3)

This is a summary of some notable events in 2023 Dec., although posted a couple of months late.

(1) 50^th anniversary of the first visit to Jupiter, by Pioneer 10 on 1973 Dec.4.  Ground-based amateur images 50 years later show more detail than the Pioneer closeup images!  Below is a subset of that compilation, and a blink animation of another pair of images by Eric Sussenbach and Chris Go, on 2023 Dec.3.

(2) Two fireballs in 24 hours, on 2023 Dec.28 & 29!  And the site of the second one was imaged by JunoCam only 12 hours later.  The image showed nothing unusual there, but this was a very valuable observation, as it was the soonest spacecraft imagery for any of the 13 impacts detected since 2010.

(3) Amateur support for Juno’s PJ57.  We show a global map (copied below) and a series of hi-res amateur image of a very interesting sector of the NEB that was closely viewed by JunoCam on Dec.30.  See also our report on Juno at PJ57 (on the “Results from Juno, 2023” page).

(4) Summary of developments on the planet, in the N. Tropical and S. Tropical domains.  Most interesting is the continuing activity in the NEB, with an extensive rift system now leading to increased darkening northwards and dark spots in the NTropZ.  All this may represent a slowly developing NEB expansion event.  This is 3-4 years after the 2020 event, which would be normal, except that it implies the cycle has been unaffected by the extreme fade and quiet revival of the NEB in 2021-22!

The full report, including small copies of the figures, is here:  Report-no4_w-minifigs

The full-size figures are here:    Report-no-4_Figures