NASA's Juno spacecraft snaps mysterious green lightning bolt on Jupiter!
The mysteries of space can be fascinating beyond imagination. In just one year, the stunning photos taken by NASA's James Webb Space Telescope have convinced us of that. But now, other NASA spacecraft are also jumping into the action. Recently, the NASA Juno spacecraft, which is orbiting Jupiter, captured a mysterious image where a green orb can be seen deep within the planet. Aliens sending signals? Not exactly. In fact, NASA has revealed that what was captured in the image is the glow from a bolt of lightning on Jupiter.
Explaining the phenomenon, a NASA blog post stated, “In this view of a vortex near Jupiter's north pole, NASA's Juno mission observed the glow from a bolt of lightning. On Earth, lightning bolts originate from water clouds, and happen most frequently near the equator, while on Jupiter lightning likely also occurs in clouds containing an ammonia-water solution, and can be seen most often near the poles”.
The image is not a new snap by Juno. The picture was taken on December 30, 2020, as the spacecraft completed its 31st close flyby of Jupiter. After that, the image was processed by Kevin M. Gill, a citizen scientist, from the raw data of the JunoCam instrument. At the time of taking the image, Juno was 32,000 kilometers above Jupiter's cloud tops.
The JunoCam is a visible light telescope camera and it was included in the payload to study the dynamics of Jupiter's clouds, particularly those at the poles. Scientists believed that the JunoCam will only be able to operate for the first eight orbits of Jupiter, or till September 2017. However, it still remains operational.
In the coming months, Juno's orbits will repeatedly take it close to Jupiter as the spacecraft passes over the giant planet's night side,
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