Close-Up Views of Jupiter North Pole

Storm systems and weather activity unlike anything encountered in the solar system are on view in these color images of Jupiter's north polar region from NASA's Juno spacecraft. Two versions of the image have been contrast-enhanced differently to bring out detail near the dark terminator and near the bright limb. The JunoCam instrument took the images to create this color view on August 27, when the spacecraft was about 48,000 miles (78,000 kilometers) above the polar cloud tops. A wavy boundary is visible halfway between the grayish region at left (closer to the pole and the nightside shadow) and the lighter-colored area on the right. The wavy appearance of the boundary represents a Rossby wave -- a north-south meandering of a predominantly east-west flow in an atmospheric jet. This may be caused by a difference in temperature between air to the north and south of this boundary, as is often the case with such waves in Earth's atmosphere. The polar region is filled with a variety of discrete atmospheric features. Some of these are ovals, but the larger and brighter features have a "pinwheel" shape reminiscent of the shape of terrestrial hurricanes. Tracking the motion and evolution

Date

2016-09-02

Photographer / author

NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS

Collection

JPL

Archive

NASA Image and Video Library

Type

photograph

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