Each Voyager passed through the boundaries of the magnetosphere—the bow shock (BS) and the magnetopause (MP)—on both the inbound and the outbound legs of its passage through the Jovian system. In this diagram, the heavy solid line represents the spacecraft trajectory, as seen looking down from the north. Also shown are the positions of the bow shock in March and of the magnetosphere in both March and July.
Several regions of plasma (charged particles) make up the Jovian magnetosphere. These sketches, based on Voyager data, show the magnetosphere as viewed from above (a) and as seen from the Jovian equatorial plane (b). Most of the plasma co-rotates with the planet and is confined near the magnetic equator, where it forms a broad plasma sheet about 100 RJ across.
The very hot plasma in the outer magnetosphere discovered by Voyager is thought to play an important role in establishing the size of the Jovian magnetosphere. Although the density is low, only about one charged particle per hundred cubic centimeters, this plasma actually carries a great deal of energy because of the high speed of the particles. It is this plasma pressure, rather than the magnetic field pressure, that appears to hold off the pressure of the solar wind. However, the balance between hot plasma inside the magnetopause and the solar wind outside is not very stable. The Voyager experimenters suggest that a small change in solar wind pressure can cause the boundary to become suddenly unstable. A large quantity of the hot plasma can then be lost, producing the bursts seen at large distances and permitting a sudden collapse of the outer magnetosphere. Continued injection of hot plasma from within would then reinflate the magnetosphere, which would expand like a balloon until another instability developed. Processes of this sort may be the cause of the rapidly varying magnetospheric boundaries observed by both Voyager spacecraft.
The rings of Jupiter are best seen when looking nearly in the direction of the Sun, since the small particles that comprise them are good forward scatterers of sunlight. This mosaic is of Voyager 2 images (two wide angle and four narrow angle) obtained from a perspective behind the planet and inside the shadow of Jupiter. The spacecraft was 2 degrees below the equator of Jupiter and 1.5 million kilometers from the rings. The shadow of the planet can be seen to obscure the near segment of the ring near the edge of the planet. The brightest region of the ring is about 1.8 RJ from the center of Jupiter. [260-678B]
Rings of Jupiter
One of the spectacular discoveries of Voyager was the existence of a ring system of small particles circling Jupiter. Saturn and Uranus were known to have rings, but none had been seen before at Jupiter.
As revealed by the Voyager cameras, the rings extend outward from the upper atmosphere to a distance of 53 000 kilometers above the cloud tops, 1.8 RJ from the center of the planet. The main rings, however, are much narrower, spanning from 47 000 to 53 000 kilometers above Jupiter. There are two main rings, a 5000-kilometer-wide segment, and a brighter, outer 800-kilometer segment. The thickness of the rings is unknown, except that it is certainly less than 30 kilometers, and probably under 1 kilometer.
