Tag: Juno

Scientists image a bright meteoroid explosion in Jupiter’s atmosphere

From aboard the Juno spacecraft, a Southwest Research Institute-led instrument observing auroras serendipitously spotted a bright flash above Jupiter’s clouds last spring. The Ultraviolet Spectrograph (UVS) team studied the data and determined that they had captured a bolide, an extremely bright meteoroid explosion in the gas giant’s upper atmosphere. Source: https://phys.org/news/2021-02-scientists-image-bright-meteoroid-explosion.html…

Juno just saw a spacerock crash into Jupiter

Timing is extraordinarily important in many aspects of astronomy. If an astronomer or their instrument is looking the wrong way at the wrong time, they could miss something spectacular. Alternatively, there are moments when our instruments capture something unexpected in regions of space that we were searching for something else. That is exactly what happened recently when a team of scientists,…

Juno spacecraft spots meteor fireball lighting up Jupiter’s skies

NASA’s Juno probe, currently circling Jupiter, has spotted what appears to be the fiery blast of a meteoroid plunging into the planet Source: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2268199-juno-spacecraft-spots-meteor-fireball-lighting-up-jupiters-skies/?utm_campaign=RSS%7CNSNS&utm_source=NSNS&utm_medium=RSS&utm_content=home…

Juno maps water ice across northern Ganymede

Jupiter’s moon Ganymede is the largest planetary satellite in the solar system. It’s also one of the most intriguing: Ganymede is the only moon with its own magnetic field, it is the most differentiated of all moons, and it likely possesses a subsurface ocean of liquid water. It was studied by the early Jupiter flybys made by the Pioneer and Voyager…

NASA’s Juno mission expands into the future

NASA has authorized a mission extension for its Juno spacecraft exploring Jupiter. The agency’s most distant planetary orbiter will now continue its investigation of the solar system’s largest planet through September 2025, or until the spacecraft’s end of life. This expansion tasks Juno with becoming an explorer of the full Jovian system—Jupiter and its rings and moons—with multiple rendezvous planned for…

InSight and Juno Keep on Trucking

NASA’s InSight lander on Mars and the Juno orbiter at Jupiter have new leases on life. From a report: The spacecraft are expected to continue gathering data about their respective planetary targets during their newly extended missions, allowing scientists to learn more about seismic activity on Mars and turn their attention to the moons of Jupiter. Juno’s mission has been extended…

Juno spacecraft updates quarter-century Jupiter mystery

Twenty-five years ago, NASA sent history’s first probe into the atmosphere of the solar system’s largest planet. But the information returned by the Galileo probe during its descent into Jupiter caused head-scratching: The atmosphere it was plunging into was much denser and hotter than scientists expected. New data from NASA’s Juno spacecraft suggests that these “hot spots” are much wider and…

How Jupiter’s moon Io gets its hellish atmosphere

Hot, active volcanoes produce almost half of Jupiter’s moon Io’s sulfur atmosphere, according to new observations using the ALMA telescope. The rest comes from cold sulfur deposits that freeze on the surface, then sublimate in sunlight. Source: https://earthsky.org/space/io-sulfur-volcanoes-hot-so2-cold-so2…