Nature Science

JUPITER’S STORMS PAINT A BEAUTIFUL PICTURE

Still from “Jupiter: Into the Unknown (NASA Juno Mission Trailer).” Courtesy of NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

JUPITER’S WEATHER

Weather on Jupiter is a beautiful thing. Storms constantly swirl across its giant surface creating a beautiful impressionistic image. We can see them up close for the first time thanks to NASA’s Juno project.

The Juno spacecraft, launched in 2011, is focused gaining a deeper understanding of our solar system’s largest planet as well as the creation entire system itself. It took 5 years to get close enough to begin to take photos. Juno is tasked with investigating the atmosphere, magnetic force field, and the dense cloud coverage.

The most recent series of Juno photographs shows Jupiter’s weather patterns, as blue and brown gaseous clouds assemble, shift, arrange, and rearrange themselves, continuously, in an endless impossible quest for equilibrium.

The Great Red Spot on Jupiter's surface, is actually a mega-storm that has been raging for hundreds of years, without abatement. It was first recorded in 1831 but may have first been discovered as early as 1665.

Enhanced image of Jupiter’s red spot.

The Great Red Spot is a persistent zone of high pressure, producing an anticyclonic storm. An anticyclone is a weather phenomenon where winds around the storm flow in the direction opposite to that of the flow around a region of low pressure. Its winds can reach up to 425 mph (680 km/h).

Jupiter appears beautifully marbleized as seen from the Juno spacecraft.

The storm measures about 12,400 miles (20,000 kilometers) long and 7,500 miles (12,000 km) wide. That makes this storm about two to three times larger than Earth! But it has been slowly shrinking. Earth-based measurements today put the spot at only a third of the size measured by the Voyager probes in 1979.

Bright pink spots appear on the poles of Jupiter as seen by the Juno spacecraft.

A second Great Spot has been discovered on Jupiter by astronomers, rivaling the scale of the Great Red Spot.

Large swirling ovals appear on the surface of Jupiter as seen by the Juno spacecraft.

All of Jupiter’s storms together look like the swirling pastel clouds of a Vincent van Gogh painting. And all of them are massive, with a wide range of cloud altitudes. The darker clouds are deeper in the atmosphere than the brightest clouds.

Jupiter appears as a stunning cream and beige marble as seen from the Juno spacecraft.

Both the small and large clouds are believed to be updrafts of ammonia ice crystals, possibly mixed with water ice.

Beautiful swirling psychedelic image of the surface of Jupiter as captured by NASA’s Juno spacecraft and processed by citizen scientist Eric Jorgensen.

Raw image data from the JunoCam instrument uploaded to the JunoCam website can be processed by citizen scientists, or photographers like you, to create beautiful new color-enhanced images.

Color enhanced image of the raging storms on Jupiter as seen from the Juno spacecraft resemble an abstract painting.

You can check out more of Juno’s images on NASA’s website. Even better, you can submit your own processed images from Juno’s raw image files on Mission Juno.

Jupiter’s aurora crowns the top of our solar system’s biggest planet.

In addition to spotting giant cyclone storms, Juno has also observed powerful auroras in Jupiter's skies.

Juno will continue its journey with Jupiter until it eventually crashes into the planet's thick atmosphere, bringing an end to its mission in 2018.

Jupiters beautiful giant red spot as seen from the Juno spacecraft.

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Jupiter resembles a beautiful blue green and gold geode as seen by the Juno spacecraft.

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Gorgeous representation of the swirling storms on the surface of Jupiter as seen from the Juno spacecraft.

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Beautiful colorized and detailed look at the swirling storms on Jupiter as seen by the Juno spacecraft.

IMAGE CREDITS:

Image: Still from “Jupiter: Into the Unknown (NASA Juno Mission Trailer).” Courtesy of NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Image: “JunoCam image of Jupiter’s Great Red Spot.” Courtesy of NASA/JPL/Gerald Eichstadt and edited by Jason Major.
Image: Great Red Spot on Jupiter. Courtesy of NASA.
Image: “second Great Spot has been discovered on Jupiter by astronomers, rivaling the scale of the planet’s famous Great Red Spot.” Courtesy of Joseph DePasquale, Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory Chandra X-ray Center.
Image: The North North Temperate Little Red Spot 1, the third largest anticyclonic oval on the planet which is typically around 3,700 miles (6,000 kilometers) long. Courtesy of NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/Gerald Eichstädt/ Seán Doran.
Image: “Jupiter's Stunning Southern Hemisphere.” Courtesy of NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS.
Image: Jupiter image captured by Juno, processed by Eric Jorgensen. Courtesy of NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS.
Image: Color-enhanced image of a massive, raging storm in Jupiter’s northern hemisphere. Courtesy of NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/Gerald Eichstädt/ Seán Doran.
Image: Spectrograph far-ultraviolet-light observations of Jupiter’s aurora, taken by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. Courtesy of NASA, ESA, and J. Nichols (University of Leicester).
Image: “Depiction of NASA's Juno spacecraft during its close encounter with Jupiter's famous Great Red Spot.” Courtesy of NASA/JPL/Björn Jónsson/Seán Doran.
Image: Jupiter’s Great Red Spot. Courtesy of NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/Gerald Eichstädt/ Seán Doran.
Image: Jupiter. Courtesy of NASA/JPL/Gervasio Robles.
Image: False color photo of giant cyclones and storms in the Upper Atmosphere of Jupiter. Courtesy of NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/Gerald Eichstädt/ Seán Doran.
Image: “Jovian Cloud Tops.” Jupiter as captured by Juno. Courtesy of NASA/JPL/Björn Jónsson.