The depth of Jupiter’s Great Red Spot revealed from Juno gravity overflights

The gravity signature of Jupiter’s Great Red Spot (GRS) is examined in the Juno data20 by combining twelve encounters of the spacecraft with the planet, including two directoverflights of the vortex. The data suggest the presence of localized density anomalies,which cause a detectable shift in the spacecraft velocity along the line-of-sight. We usetwo different approaches to infer the GRS depth: a mascon method, where the densityperturbations are modeled with disk-shaped mass concentrations, and a Slepian method,25 which defines the gravitational signature of the GRS in terms of orthonormal functions ina limited domain. Both approaches yield consistent results, implying that the anticycloneis shallower than 500 km. Furthermore, at the 1σ level it is found to be 300±100 km deep.