Comet Chunks Expected to Rock Jupiter : Astronomy: Fragments will strike in July with massive force. Scientists say the huge planet’s atmosphere may ripple, yielding clues to its interior structure.

A pearl-like string of comet fragments is slow-dancing with Jupiter, and when they collide next July the solar system’s biggest planet should ripple like a bowl of Jell-O, scientists said Thursday.

The resulting explosions should tell scientists a lot about Jupiter’s dense gaseous interior, which is cloaked by its opaque, multicolored atmosphere.

The five-day series of perhaps 20 collisions, each packing 10,000 times the explosive power of the largest existing nuclear bomb, also could produce a new ring around Jupiter or light up the planet’s moons with explosive flashes.

Because such an event is unprecedented in modern history, what may happen is any astrophysicist’s guess--and a platoon of scientists gave papers on widely varying predictions at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union.

Whatever does play out, scientists said, the impact will happen on the far side of Jupiter and thus not be directly visible from Earth.

Torrance Johnson of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena said that the world’s astronomers and astrophysicists are planning to study the event with a variety of space probes, from the freshly repaired Hubble Space Telescope to a 20-year-old Voyager satellite and the Galileo spacecraft launched to explore Jupiter.

“We shouldn’t raise people’s hopes of being able to go out in their back yard and see a fantastic phenomenon on Jupiter with a small telescope,” he said.

The collisions are expected to start on July 18.

Scientists already are busy with computer models of the Jovian atmosphere, trying to anticipate how the powerful salvo of speeding comet chunks will act.

The predictions ranged from no visible impact to the creation of a new and permanent storm system similar to Jupiter’s famous red spot. Several scientists supported a Massachusetts Institute of Technology simulation that forecasts a series of ripples racing through the Jovian atmosphere, causing the planet to shudder like gelatin.

Astronomers said the comet, named Shoemaker-Levy 9 after its discoverers, probably broke up in July, 1992, when it passed near enough to Jupiter to feel the full grip of its enormous gravity.

The impact of comet fragments should tell scientists a lot about Jupiter’s atmosphere and what lies beneath it. Some researchers hope that the comet debris, when it explodes from the intense heat of friction, will blast out some material from inside the planet.

“We’ll get a probe of the (planet’s) density structure that we can’t get any other way,” said Andrew Ingersoll of the California Institute of Technology.