Scott Bolton spent years sending a spacecraft to Jupiter, only to discover how much scientists had gotten wrong. He was thrilled.
As principal investigator of NASA’s Juno mission, Scott helped conceive an undertaking that would take nearly five years just to reach its destination. Juno arrived on July 4, 2016, its sensitive electronics protected inside a titanium vault against Jupiter’s punishing radiation.
The planet confounded expectations. Winds plunged thousands of kilometers beneath the clouds. Its core appeared diffuse, with heavy elements mixed into the surrounding hydrogen. Enormous cyclones gathered at the poles in geometric arrangements. Decades of preparation had brought Scott close enough to discover questions he hadn’t known to ask.
A scientist at Southwest Research Institute, Scott finds connections well beyond his field. For every orbit Jupiter’s moon Ganymede completes, Europa makes two and Io four. He hears a musical relationship in those numbers. Galileo, he likes to point out, also played the lute.
Through friendships with Vangelis and Trent Reznor, Scott brought music into Juno. Reznor and Atticus Ross composed a soundtrack for a film inspired by the mission. Vangelis’s music accompanied imagery of Jupiter and Ganymede, bringing a sense of movement and proximity to worlds impossibly far away.
The invitation went further. Juno made its camera’s raw images available to the public. People working at home helped reveal the intricate structures and colors of Jupiter’s storms. Anyone with the patience to look could contribute.
Scott makes room for that kind of curiosity. A composer can respond to a discovery in ways its discoverer never imagined. Someone processing an image at home can notice something others missed.
After decades studying Jupiter, he remains willing to let the planet change his mind.
