High-order gravity field models for Jupiter in support of NASA's Juno mission
Statistical Physics, Nonlinear Dynamics, Complex Systems, Soft and Fluid Matter, Biological Physics
Final Report Abstract
I have calculated the even static gravitational harmonics J2n of Jupiter up to the high order of J18 using the two-dimensional formulation of the CMS method of Hubbard 2013. By applying the predictions on the influence of deep winds on J2 to J8 by Cao et al. 2017, this work allowed to constrain the depth of the zonal flows to at most 7000 km, as subsequently confirmed and improved by the Juno Science Team. I have implemented also the three-dimensional CMS method of Wahl et al. (2017) and expanded it to compute the static tidal response of multiple Galilean satellites on Jupiter’s tesseral harmonics and Love numbers. This work allowed for a quantitative determination of the fluctuation in these coefficients due to the different possible satellite configurations, previously not noted in the literature. The work on the Love numbers is planned to be extended to exoplanet–host star systems, where in some cases eccentric orbits or strong flattening may yield favorable conditions for an observational determination of k2 . Such work will be important for the upcoming PLATO mission. Further work on H/He immiscibility in Jupiter has been postponed until uncertainties in the H/He phase diagram can be reduced and until entropy values of H/He mixtures for the Rostock equation of state are available.
