English

Equilibrium Tidal Response of Jupiter: Detectability by Juno

Earth and Planetary Astrophysics 2020-03-11 v1

Abstract

An observation of Jupiter's tidal response is anticipated for the on-going Juno spacecraft mission. We combine self-consistent, numerical models of Jupiter's equilibrium tidal response with observed Doppler shifts from the Juno gravity science experiment to test the sensitivity of the spacecraft to tides raised by the Galilean satellites and the Sun. The concentric Maclaurin spheroid (CMS) method finds the equilibrium shape and gravity field of a rotating, liquid planet with the tide raised by a satellite, expanded in Love numbers (knmk_{nm}). We present improvements to CMS theory that eliminate an unphysical center of mass offset and study in detail the convergence behavior of the CMS approach. We demonstrate that the dependence of knmk_{nm} with orbital distance is important when considering the combined tidal response for Jupiter. Conversely, the details of the interior structure have a negligible influence on knmk_{nm}, for models that match the zonal harmonics J2J_2, J4J_4 and J6J_6, already measured to high precision by Juno. As the mission continues, improved coverage of Jupiter's gravity field at different phases of Io's orbit is expected to yield an observed value for the degree-2 Love number (k22k_{22}) and potentially select higher--degree knmk_{nm}. We present a test of the sensitivity of the Juno Doppler signal to the calculated knmk_{nm}, which suggests the detectability of k33k_{33}, k42k_{42} and k31k_{31}, in addition to k22k_{22}. A mismatch of a robust Juno observation with the remarkably small range in calculated Io equilibrium k22=0.58976±0.0001k_{22}=0.58976\pm0.0001, would indicate a heretofore uncharacterized dynamic contribution to the tides.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2001.03695,
  title  = {Equilibrium Tidal Response of Jupiter: Detectability by Juno},
  author = {Sean M Wahl and Marzia Parisi and William M Folkner and William B Hubbard and Burkhard Militzer},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2001.03695},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

26 Pages, 11 figures, 7 Tables, Accepted to ApJ

R2 v1 2026-06-23T13:08:30.603Z