Juno is the NASA spacecraft that allowed experts to take a better look at Jupiter. This time, the spacecraft managed to deliver important information about Jupiter’s North Pole. 3D infrared images became available and NASA recently released a movie that presents all the cyclones and the anticyclones that currently exist in the polar regions.
The images were presented at the European Geosciences Union General Assembly that took place on Wednesday, April 11, in Vienna, Austria. The data was collected by Juno’s Jovian InfraRed Auroral Mapper (JIRAM) instrument.
JIRAM is able to capture the light that emerges from the interior of Jupiter, and it does that at any point of the day or night. The weather is probed down to 50 or 70 kilometres below the cloud tops of Jupiter. “Before Juno, we could only guess what Jupiter’s poles would look like. Now, with Juno flying over the poles at a close distance it permits the collection of infrared imagery on Jupiter’s polar weather patterns and its massive cyclones in unprecedented spatial resolution,” ,” said Alberto Adriani, Juno co-investigator from the Institute for Space Astrophysics and Planetology.
Animation depicting the north pole
In the movie we are taken on a journey low over the north pole and see the cyclone that exists in this area, as well as the other eight smaller cyclones that surround it. The infrared cameras were able to sense the temperature on Jupiter, and that way they managed to calculate the force of the cyclones.
The video can be watched below and as you can see the areas differ in colour. The darker areas are the ones that are colder and the yellow ones are warmer. The highest temperatures is around 13°C and the lowest around -83°C.
