Juno probe returns first images of Jupiter

The north pole of Jupiter contains unique storms and weather systems unlike anything scientists have witnessed anywhere else in the solar system, according to new images obtained by NASA’s Juno spacecraft late last month and sent back to the US space agency earlier this week.

The photographs were captured by Juno during the first of its 36 orbital flybys of the Jupiter on August 27, which brought the probe to roughly 2,600 miles (4,200 km) above the cloud tops of the gas giant, Space.com senior writer Mike Wall reported on Friday.

Juno’s flyby took six hours and produced six megabytes of data that took one and a half days to download to scientists on the ground, the agency said in a statement. While analysis of that data is ongoing, the early results have already produced some significant surprises.

“First glimpse of Jupiter’s north pole, and it looks like nothing we have seen or imagined before,” explained Scott Bolton, principal investigator of the Juno mission from the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI). “It’s bluer in color up there than other parts of the planet, and there are a lot of storms.”

“There is no sign of the latitudinal bands or zone and belts that we are used to,” Bolton added. “This image is hardly recognizable as Jupiter. We’re seeing signs that the clouds have shadows, possibly indicating that the clouds are at a higher altitude than other features.”

New hot spots, radio transmissions also detected during flyby

While images of Saturn revealed that there was a large hexagonal storm swirling above its north pole, the new photos – which were taken using the spacecraft’s JunoCam imager – revealed that Jupiter does not possess anything remotely similar, Bolton said. The pictures are proof that “the largest planet in our solar system is truly unique,” the SwRI researcher added.

Along with JunoCam, each of the probe’s eight scientific instruments were active and collecting information during the recent flyby. That includes the Jovian Infrared Auroral Mapper (JIRAM), which captures views of Jupiter’s pole in infrared light and revealed never-before-seen hot spots on the planet and the first-ever infrared views of its southern auroras, according to Space.com.

“While we knew that the first-ever infrared views of Jupiter’s south pole could reveal the planet’s southern aurora, we were amazed to see it for the first time,” said Alberto Adriani of the Istituto di Astrofisica e Planetologia Spaziali in Rome, co-investigator of the JIRAM project.

“No other instruments, both from Earth or space, have been able to see the southern aurora. Now, with JIRAM, we see that it appears to be very bright and well-structured. The high level of detail in the images will tell us more about the aurora’s morphology and dynamics,” he added.

Also during its flyby, Juno was able to “hear” ghostly-sounding transmissions emitted by the planet’s auroras thanks to its Radio/Plasma Wave Experiment (Waves) experiment. While these radio emissions had been known about for more than six decades, never before has there been an opportunity to analyze them from such a close distance, NASA officials noted.

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Image credit: NASA

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