First Hubble Space Telescope Movies of Jupiter’s Ultraviolet Aurora During the NASA Juno Prime Mission

The primary goal of this HST campaign is to complement Juno-UVS (Ultraviolet Spectrograph) observations. This complementarity is four-fold as HST observes Jupiter’s aurora when: 1) Juno-UVS is turned off, that is about 98% of Juno’s 14-day orbit, and Juno’s in situ instruments are in operation. 2) Juno-UVS is operating, but observes the opposite hemisphere of Jupiter. 3) UVS is on in the same hemisphere, but too close to Jupiter to have a global, contextual, view of the aurora and/or UVS is affected by the noise induced by Jupiter’s radiation belts. 4) Juno is too far from Jupiter to get a detailed view of the aurora. In addition, HST will observe the auroral and airglow emissions of the Galilean moons Io, Ganymede and Europa, when UVS is measuring their auroral footprints in Jupiter’s ionosphere.
During this campaign, HST is obtaining 45-min STIS time-tag images -movies- of both hemispheres of Jupiter and STIS/COS spectra of Jupiter's moons. These observations are taking place during 4 sequences of Juno's orbit (Figure: typical orbit in magnetic coordinates): 1) Perijove segment: a 6-hour sequence bracketing the time of Juno's closest approach of Jupiter. 2) Crossing segments: few hours periods during which Juno is crossing the magnetic equator of Jupiter and in situ instruments are observing the plasma sheet particles. 3) Perijove +/- 1 Jovian rotation (or more), to provide a context for the auroral activity before and after perijove. 4) Apojove segment: a 12-hour period bracketing the time when Juno is farthest from Jupiter and Juno-UVS is continuously monitoring the global auroral UV power of Jupiter.
During Juno orbit PJ5, between 28 Nov. and 07 Dec. 2016, HST obtains 9 STIS movies: 3 movies of the northern aurora near perijove, 1 movie (north) one Jovian rotation before and 2 movies (south- north) one and two Jovian rotations after perijove, 2 movies (north) during two close CS crossings, and 1 movie near apojove. These movies will be commented during this presentation.