Tag Archives: jupiter

Analysis of a set of July photos from NASA’s JunoCam has revealed a cluster of swirling storms near Jupiter’s north pole. The agency released the entire dataset, which is cool enough all on its own. But now, a NASA citizen science project called “Jovian Vortex Hunter” is seeking volunteers to …

Juno launched on August 5, 2011 and successfully entered Jupiter’s orbit on July 4, 2016. During each of the spacecraft’s 37 passes of Jupiter to date, a specialized suite of instruments has peered below its turbulent cloud deck. The new results from the Juno mission highlight the inner workings of …

On the evening of Sept. 13, something hit Jupiter, producing an explosion and a flash of light visible even to amateur astronomers with off-the-shelf telescopes. Now, the hunt is on to figure out what the impactor could have been. The collision was first reported by Brazilian amateur astronomer José Luis …

  NASA builds its hardware to last. Missions like Curiosity, Hubble, and New Horizons have survived long past their initial design life. This allows NASA to wring out every bit of science from its most successful missions, and now you can add Juno and InSight to the list. NASA has …

  Jupiter and Saturn, our solar system’s two largest worlds, have been drawing ever closer to each other in the sky in recent months as seen from our Earthly vantage, an event that has come to be known as a great conjunction. The two planets will appear closest together on …

NASA’s Juno spacecraft has been in orbit around Jupiter since 2016. One of its instruments is the ultraviolet spectrograph (UVS), which is primarily used to make ultraviolet images of Jupiter’s auroras. During the first four years of the mission, the UVS instrument has observed 11 transient bright flashes. These flashes …

In a process called tidal heating, gravitational push and pull from Jupiter’s Galilean moons — Europa, Ganymede, Io and Callisto — and the gas giant itself stretch and squish the moons enough to warm them. As a result, some of the icy moons contain interiors warm enough to host oceans …

May Form Ammonia-Water Hailstones A new study suggests that during Jupiter’s violent storms, hailstones form from a cooled mixture of water and ammonia gas, similar to the process in Earth’s storms where hail forms in the presence of supercooled liquid water; growth of these Jovian hailstones, dubbed ‘mushballs,’ creates a …

Juno Discovers ‘Shallow Lightning’ on Jupiter An unexpected form of electrical discharge, ‘shallow lightning’ originates from Jovian clouds containing an ammonia-water solution, according to a new analysis of data collected by the Stellar Reference Unit instrument onboard NASA’s Juno spacecraft. This illustration uses data obtained by NASA’s Juno mission to …

New Oval-Shaped Feature Spotted on Jupiter: Clyde’s Spot An astronomer from South Africa has discovered a new ‘white oval’ in the southern hemisphere of the gas giant Jupiter. Jupiter as captured by Clyde Foster’s telescope, and Juno’s approximate trajectory as it zoomed close by the planet, traveling from north to …