Simulation of Antenna Brightness Temperatures for the Juno Microwave Radiometer

A major objective of the Juno mission is the determination of global Jovian water and ammonia abundances from measurements by the Juno Microwave Radiometer (MWR). To this end, an instrument simulator has been developed to compute antenna brightness temperatures starting from a simplified atmospheric model of Jupiter involving a small set of tunable (and retrievable) parameters. The atmospheric model is the first element in a pipeline comprised of a number of components, including a model for the radiative transfer, a calculation of the instantaneous position and orientation of the antennae, and a set of precomputed skymaps of synchrotron emission and galactic background radiation. The output of this forward model is a time-ordered series of antenna brightness temperatures which can then be compared to measured data. Here, we primarily focus on details of this calculation but also present preliminary comparisons to MWR data and discuss potential improvements that will be needed to better fit the measurements and retrieve Jupiter's global water and ammonia abundances, hence the oxygen and nitrogen elemental ratios.