As per NASA, the JunoCam instrument acquired a never-before-seen view on Jupiter’s south pole on August 27, 2016, when the spacecraft was about 58,700 miles (94,500 kilometers) above the polar region.
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The Juno mission to observe Jupiter at a close range started when the spacecraft entered Jupiter’s orbit last July 4 by surviving a delicate 35-minute engine burn that slowed down the spacecraft to allow Jupiter’s gravity to capture Juno into orbit. Experts say these weather formations are unlike anything they’ve seen before.
The north pole of Jupiter looks nearly nothing like the south pole.
The six-hour transit resulted into six megabytes of data.
“First glimpse of Jupiter’s North Pole, and it looks like nothing we have seen or imagined before”, explained Juno principal investigator Scott Bolton.
Storm systems and freakish weather activities might sound like two features of Jupiter we shouldn’t consider “news”, given the gaseous make-up of the planet’s atmosphere.
One obvious novelty is that Jupiter’s north pole is bluer than expected and the Jovian arctic is a stormy region devoid of the familiar latitudinal bands found closer to the equator. “We’re seeing signs that the clouds have shadows, possibly indicating that the clouds are at a higher altitude than other features”. In addition, there is a hexagonal feature at the north pole – something that has been observed on Saturn, but this is a first for Jupiter. These emissions are the strongest in the solar system.
A montage of images as Juno approached and left Jupiter during the fly-by.
“And 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”.
One of the most notable findings of these first-ever pictures of Jupiter’s north and south poles is something that the JunoCam imager did not see, NASA said. 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”, Adriani said. It’s been changed from radio waves into audio and it makes that great sound.
The sounds may be generated by the massive auroras on Jupiter’s north pole. “Now we are going to try to figure out where the electrons come from that are generating them”, Kurth said. The radio/plasma wave experiment (Waves) was also fired up to record ghostly-sounding transmissions emanating from above the planet – a phenomena that has been known about since the 1950s but has never been studied from such proximity.
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May the force be with you, Juno.
