Before completing the third close approach to the gas giant on Sunday, the camera of the apparatus captured an unforgettable “pearl” storm.
The thick atmosphere of the planet hides many mysteries. Her rage surpasses ours in anger, and the energy waves from the explosion through the clouds and turbulence create a scene resembling the artist’s watercolor painting. Using the instrument of the mission of Juno, we obtained pictures from a bird's eye view (or satellite eyes) of “pearls” - one of eight bright, counterclockwise, storms that capture the southern hemisphere.
This spectacle hit the lens as it approached the “perijove” point (a very elongated orbit) at 12:04 am ET at an altitude of 24,600 miles (40,000 km) from the atmosphere.
The camera is not a scientific instrument on a spacecraft, but a propaganda project to attract public attention, inviting enthusiasts to analyze the process from photographs and participate in decision making (online voting) on what to focus on the lens. But the absence of the label “science” does not mean that it cannot be used for this. “We wanted to attract attention, so we put the camera in the first place. But there is no reason not to use imagery for research, ”said lead scientist Candice Hansen from the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Arizona, during a presentation at the conference of the American Geographical Union in San Francisco, where the images were presented.
At the center of this observation is the storm depicted in the top shot. Their line has been fixed in the southern region of the hemisphere since 1986. Now there are 8 bright storms, but over the past 30 years, the figure ranges from 6 to 9. The information received will help you understand what their shape is and why their number changes in such a short time.
