New spectacular images of the hypnotic
vortices of Jupiter
are the new shots taken by NASA 's
Juno
probe during the last flight of the gas giant, which took place on 5 July 2022. They are color details of the enormous
storms
present at the north pole and which characterize the Jovian atmosphere.
Launched in 2011, Juno reached the gas giant five years later and now, after an extension of the mission that should have ended in 2021, it is in a highly elliptical orbit that brings it close to the Jovian atmosphere every 43 days. flying over the planet at an altitude of 5,000 kilometers.
The new images were taken on July 5, while the spacecraft was
25,000 kilometers away
, and reveals many details of the storms that reach a
height of about 50 kilometers
.
They are eddies with a diameter of hundreds of kilometers and which are characterized by different colors according to the direction of rotation.
The vortices in Jupiter's atmosphere seen by the Juno probe (source: NASA / JPL-Caltech / SwRI / MSSSImage processing by Brian Swift © CC BY)
The probe also has two important
Italian scientific instruments on board, the
Jiram
infrared image spectrometer
, made by Leonardo and under the scientific responsibility of the National Institute of Astrophysics (Inaf), and the KaT
radioscience
instrument , made by Thales Alenia Space and coordinated by the Sapienza University of Rome.
To catalog the many images of vortices and storms produced so far, NASA developed the Jovian Vortex Hunter project in which everyone, voluntarily, can contribute to catalog them.
Over 2,400 volunteers have already classified over 375,000 images.