Today, NASA released gorgeous images from the Hubble Space Telescope’s exploration of Jupiter’s auroras.
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He says the dramatic auroras captured on Jupiter are among the most active he’s ever seen.
Auroras are extraordinary vivid glows that occur when high energy particles enter a planet’s atmosphere nears its magnetic poles and collide with atom of gas.
The Hubble is in the middle of a months-long observation of Jupiter as NASA’s Juno spacecraft prepares to enter the planet’s orbit in the coming days.
The solar-powered Juno spacecraft is on the final leg of a five-year, 1.8 billion-mile trip to the biggest planet in our solar system.
According to Juno’s principal investigator, Scott Bolton from the Southwest Research Institute, Juno just crossed the boundary of Jupiter’s turf, where the probe is closing in fast on the planet and already obtaining valuable data.
Jupiter is also famous for the Great Red Spot which is a storm seen on the surface of the planet. Without it, “Juno’s electronic brain would more than likely fry before the end of the very first flyby of the planet”.
Auroras typically happen close to a planet’s poles, as that is where the magnetosphere is thinnest and most easily disturbed or penetrated by solar wind.
Jupiter’s magnetosphere – the region of space affected by its magnetic field – is 20,000 times stronger than ours on Earth.
During its mission, Juno will make 37 “close approaches” to Jupiter, and each one could imperil the craft. Previous space probes to Jupiter functioned with nuclear power, per NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Unlike Earth’s auroras, Jupiter’s auroras never stop.
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As well as producing handsome images, this programme aims to determine how various components of Jupiter’s auroras respond to different conditions in the solar wind, a stream of charged particles ejected from the Sun. They represent the Roman god Jupiter; his wife, Juno; and Galileo Galilei – the scientist who discovered Jupiter’s four largest moons on January 7, 1610. While on Earth the phenomenon is caused by charged particles raining down from the sun, Jupiter has an additional aurora “dynamo”. In 2007, it cooperated with NASA’s New Horizons, which was on its way to Pluto.
