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Credit: NASA, ESA, A. Simon (NASA-GSFC), M. H. Wong (UC Berkeley), J. DePasquale (STScI)

Published: 29 September 2025

Webinar with Mike Wong (University of California, USA)
recorded September 25, 2025

Game Changers Online Seminar

Planets

OPAL

Hubble

OPAL 10-Year Anniversary

Webinar with Mike Wong (University of California, USA)

The Outer Planet Atmospheres Legacy (OPAL) program with Hubble was started in 2014 with the goal of studying time-domain phenomena in Jupiter, Uranus, and Neptune, with Saturn added in 2018 once the Cassini spacecraft was de-orbited. Key areas of study are heat transport and climate circulation, atmospheric structure and evolution, composition, the formation of clouds and hazes, impact processes, and impactor populations.

Recorded Webinar

Abstract

Once a year, the OPAL program images each of our four outer planets, producing pairs of global maps in multiple filters, which are made available at the MAST archive. The OPAL team (Simon, Wong, and Orton) have used the data to discover new dark spots on Neptune, discover a UV-dark oval in Jupiter’s southern polar haze cap, measure changes in Jupiter’s Great Red Spot over time, detect fine-scale waves, chronicle shifts in haze and cloud layers on all four planets, measure jet streams, and study the structure and evolution of convective storms. The data have also provided a valuable resource enhancing the science return from the Juno and New Horizons spacecraft missions, also supplementing observations from a growing list of observatories including JWST, Kepler, Spitzer, VLA, Keck, ALMA, IRTF, VLT, and Gemini.

About the Speaker

Mike Wong is a researcher at the University of California at Berkeley (Astronomy Department) and at the Univeristy of Michigan (AOSS Department). His analysis of data from the mass spectrometer on the Galileo probe launched his interest in cloud-forming gases in Jupiter’s atmosphere. Later, he participated with the Cassini/CIRS team in the discovery of the signature of ammonia ice in Jupiter’s thermal spectrum. With Franck Marchis, he discovered the first moonlet binary (the Hektor system) among the Trojan asteroids. He used the Hubble Space Telescope to image the color change of Oval BA and the 2009 impact site on Jupiter. The 2009 impact data were the first science data ever taken with the Wide Field Camera 3, an instrument that he helped calibrate at the Space Telescope Science Institute. Mike Wong is a Mars Science Laboratory Collaborator, working with the Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) and Rover Environmental Monitoring Station (REMS) teams.

Credits ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, A. Martel