Gas Giants, Wild Weather, and Two Spectacular Spacecraft

Ashwin Vasavada

Jupiter and Saturn, in addition to being the most photogenic objects in the solar system, are planets where meteorology and fluid dynamics play out on scales well beyond our experience on Earth. They have dozens of jet streams, multiple cloud decks, and storms that could easily swallow the Earth. We learn how these planets work by carefully comparing observations with the best available theory, laboratory work, and numerical models. The last decade has seen major advances in all areas, many of which involve the data returned by recent spacecraft. This talk will focus on the imaging of Jupiter and Saturn by the Galileo and Cassini spacecraft. It will also introduce the planets and the outstanding scientific questions, discuss some of the challenges involved in imaging, and describe how results from the last decade have changed our understanding of the meteorology on those planets.

Dr. Vasavada has been an associate of the imaging teams on Galileo (1996-2000) and Cassini (1999-present). He received his PhD in planetary science from Caltech in 1998, and joined JPL in 2004 after an adjunct faculty position at UCLA. His somewhat scatterbrained approach to research has led to projects on the Moon, Mercury, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. He currently serves as Deputy Project Scientist on the 2011 Mars Science Laboratory rover mission.