NASA's Juno Orbiter Sends Back the First Images of Jupiter's North Pole

With its enormous size and iconic Great Red Spot, Jupiter is one of the most recognizable planets in the our solar system. But on Friday, NASA released new views of the gas giant that have never been seen before, including the first closeup look at its mysterious North Pole.

Behold, the great Jovian North.

The new picture series was captured by NASA's Juno orbiter on August 27, at an altitude of around 2,500 miles (4,200 kilometers) above the planet's maelstrom of storms. It marked Juno's first orbital flyby of Jupiter, and produced six megabytes worth of unprecedented observations with all nine of the spacecraft's specialized instruments.

"First glimpse of Jupiter's north pole, and it looks like nothing we have seen or imagined before," said Scott Bolton, principal investigator of the Juno mission, in a statement. "It's bluer in color up there than other parts of the planet, and there are a lot of storms. There is no sign of the latitudinal bands or zone and belts that we are used to—this image is hardly recognizable as Jupiter."

"We're seeing signs that the clouds have shadows, possibly indicating that the clouds are at a higher altitude than other features," he added.

While JunoCam, the orbiter's optical camera, was snapping these shadowy closeups, Juno's infrared instrument JI-RAM was dutifully mapping the gas giant's infrared emissions, with particular focus on its radiant polar auroras. Not only did this produce trippy macro visuals of Jupiter's interior dynamics, it also revealed the gas giant's southern lights for the first time.

"[W]hile we knew that the first ever infrared views of Jupiter's south pole could reveal the planet's southern aurora, we were amazed to see it for the first time," said said Alberto Adriani, JIRAM co-investigator. "No other instruments, both from Earth or space, have been able to see the southern aurora."

But perhaps the most memorable observation of Juno's maiden flyby was this acoustic rendition of the planet's ghostly radio emissions, picked up by the Radio/Plasma Wave Experiment (Waves) instrument.

That's Jupiter "talking to us" through eerie radio signals, with wavelengths measuring about a kilometer in length, generated by its massive auroras. Time to bone up on the Jovian language.

The Juno team will have plenty of opportunities to dig much deeper into some of these tantalizing features. The orbiter is scheduled to make 36 more close orbital flybys of Jupiter's poles before it bravely hurls itself into the fatal embrace of the gas giant in February 2018.

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