Henrik Melin
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The spacecraft that came before Juno
The Juno spacecraft is not the first to visit Jupiter – this honour goes to the Pioneer 10 spacecraft back in December of 1973. The planet has been visited by a total of eight spacecraft prior to the arrival of Juno in July of 2016. Out of these eight, only the Galileo spacecraft entered orbit, […]
First, wonderful, glimpse of Jupiter
Wow! The Juno spacecraft did not disappoint! The images released after Juno’s first science perijove are absolutely stunning. The one that grabbed me was this one: Jupiter’s southern infrared aurora as observed by Juno JIRAM (NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/ASI/INAF/JIRAM) It is the first image released from the Jovian Infrared Auroral Mapper (JIRAM), an instrument contributed by the […]
Juno’s second perijove – may the science commence!
The Juno spacecraft is today 3 million km from Jupiter, and it has spent its time in the first of two capture orbits about the planet. These orbits take 53 days to complete and are followed by the main science phase with orbits about 14 days long. The capture orbit itself is designed to keep […]
Hot hot hot, above the Great Red Spot
One of the largest remaining questions in understanding the upper atmosphere of Jupiter, the outmost layer of the atmosphere, is: ‘Why is this region so very hot?’. Out where Jupiter orbits the Sun, the sunlight is very faint, and cannot provide enough energy to produce the temperatures that we measure.We call this the ‘energy crisis’. […]
Observing Jupiter’s fierce weather from the ground
In late April 2016, I had the privilege of spending a few weeks in Hawaii, observing on the NASA Infrared Telescope Facility, using a spectrograph called TEXES. This is an instrument that can measure the composition and structure of Jupiter’s clouds, and was built at the University of Texas, Austin. These observations provide a picture […]
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