How much oxygen is on Jupiter?
Without getting too technical, oxygen is extremely rare in the atmosphere of Jupiter. We know there is a large amount of water vapor well below the Jupiter clouds, and chemical breakup of water molecules must yield some percentage of oxygen, but very little (if any) reaches the atmosphere above the clouds. The abundance relative to hydrogen in the atmosphere above the Jupiter clouds for water vapor is about 0.000 001 (i.e., one water vapor molecule for every million hydrogen molecules); the abundance of carbon monoxide is 0.000 000 002 (two parts in a billion). Free oxygen is lower in abundance than either of these and, to my knowledge, has not been detected in Jupiter’s atmosphere. The situation is slightly different for Saturn. While similar conditions exist there, Saturn has an extensive ring composed mostly of water ice particles. Sunlight acting on that water ice frees some of the oxygen, which has been detected as a constituent of the “atmosphere” of the rings (although not in th
