NASA has just received the first data and images of Jupiter’s north pole from the Juno spacecraft, and what they’ve found is unlike anything they’ve ever imagined.
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“This image is hardly recognizable as Jupiter”, he says.
Jupiter is a planet worth studying for many reasons: It’s the biggest and most massive in the solar system by a long shot, and was probably the first planet formed.
“Saturn has a hexagon at the north pole”, said Bolton. The clouds are pale blue in color, and those signature bands or zone belts are nowhere to be found.
“I$3 t looks like nothing we have seen or imagined before”, Scott Bolton, a planetary scientist at the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio and the Juno mission’s leader, said in a NASA statement released September 2.
NASA also released an image of Jupiter’s southern aurora, a unique view that could be captured only by a spacecraft close to Jupiter. Such views are not possible from Earth.
The new photos reveal never-before-seen views of the planet’s north polar region.
“JIRAM is getting under Jupiter’s skin, giving us our first infrared close-ups of the planet”, Alberto Adriani, JIRAM co-investigator from Istituto di Astrofisica e Planetologia Spaziali, in Rome, said in a statement. No other instru-ments, both from Earth or space, have been able to see the southern aurora. “The high level of detail in the images will tell us more about the aurora’s morphology and dynamics”.
Juno also managed to “hear” Jupiter’s auroras, using the spacecraft’s Radio/Plasma Wave Experiment (also known as Waves).
“We are in an orbit nobody has ever been in before, and these images give us a whole new perspective on this gas-giant world”, Bolton said in a previous NASA statement. The planet’s sporadic radio emissions were first noticed in 1955, when Bernard Burke and Kenneth Franklin picked up the signal from the Mills Cross radio telescope in Australia. “Now we are going to try to figure out where the electrons come from that are generating them”.
All of the spacecraft’s instruments have been turned on and are collecting data, and they should continue to send information back to Earth through the course of the craft’s next 36 flybys of Jupiter.
The spacecraft is now flying on an ellipse around Jupiter that takes 53 days to complete.
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Juno’s observations should help scientists better understand Jupiter’s composition and structure, including whether the giant planet harbors a core of heavy elements. So poking and prodding at Jupiter could reveal a lot about the origin of our planet, not to mention the fundamentals of solar system formation in general.
