Juno Images … a new look at Jupiter

Here is just one sample of the discoveries NASA’s Juno Mission is making as it orbits Jupiter.

This is how our textbooks show Jupiter. Well, the brilliant aurora around the north pole is an “upgrade” based on newer observations and clever image enhancement to make them look brighter (they are real, just not that bright). However, this is the Jupiter we are familiar with … all bright face  ….  wonderful multicolored stripes. We have always seen it fully lighted like this, because it orbits way out there away from the Sun. The Earth is in a much tighter orbit around the Sun. From here, or from our Hubble Telescope orbiting Earth, we might as well be seeing it from the perspective of the Sun. Those stripes are equatorial bands of big (really big) and very persistent storms. Many Earths would fit inside the biggest, called “the great red spot.”

 

Here is a recent picture of Jupiter just taken by the Juno spacecraft. This is a brand new perspective! We are looking directly downward onto the planet’s south pole. The Juno spacecraft is in a polar orbit around Jupiter that is highly elliptical. It moves slowly at great altitude and then whips down much closer to the surface at the opposite side and climbs back up to its peak altitude.  That way, it spends as little time as possible close to Jupiter and inside the radiation belts that would be lethal to its electronics. However, it will observe the whole planet as geography slowly rotates beneath the orbit plane. Also it can get some great closeups.

From this perspective, only the half of Jupiter is facing the Sun is lighted. The Sun would be far away, straight up in the picture. The familiar bright colored storm bands are barely discernable out at the edges (which would be Jupiter’s equator). Near the south pole, the storms are also huge, but appear as whirling eddies in the atmosphere moving chaotically. The dominant color is blue/grey, not the orange and white stripes we normally observed.

There will be lots to learn from Juno.