NASA's Juno mission has obtained fascinating new data on Jupiter, the giant of the Solar System.
Thanks to infrared radiation, it has been able to capture the light emitted by atmospheric currents under the surface clouds. The images show densely packed cyclones and anticyclones permeating the planet's polar regions.
Scientists on the Juno mission took the data collected by the spacecraft's Jovian InfraRed Auroral Mapper (JIRAM) instrument and recreated the north pole currents in three-dimensional fashion. Imagining itself in the infrared part of the spectrum, JIRAM captures the light emerging from inside Jupiter equally well, at night or during the day. The instrument scans the climate layer up to 30 to 45 miles (50 to 70 kilometers) below Jupiter's clouds. The images will help the team understand the forces at work in the animation: a north pole dominated by a central cyclone surrounded by eight circumpolar cyclones with diameters ranging from 2,500 to 2,900 miles (4,000 to 4,600 kilometers).
"Before Juno, we could only guess what the poles of Jupiter would be like," according to Alberto Adriani, Juno co-investigator at the Institute for Space Astrophysics and Planetology in Rome. "Now, with Juno flying over the poles at close range, it enables the collection of infrared images on the polar weather patterns of Jupiter and its massive cyclones in unprecedented spatial resolution ."
