Jenam 2011NASA’s Juno mission spotted “pepperoni” storms on Jupiter. The space agency released the news on National Pizza Day, making Jupiter’s storms all the more interesting for us. NASA posted a video of the giant planet’s north pole on its Instagram handle. You can see a dense formation of thunderstorms with red and yellow hues. NASA explained the storms color and occurrence in the legend. Adding a quirk to the post, the space agency wrote, “National Pizza Day? How about Interplanetary Pizza Day? Our Juno mission saw “pepperoni” storms hovering over Jupiter. »
Indeed, storms look like red pepperoni on pizza. But there is more than meets the eye. The image is not an ordinary photograph. This is an infrared image of Jupiter’s north pole. This is how the coloring in the video was done.
The caption added: “The film uses images derived from data collected by the Jovian Infrared Auroral Mapper (JIRAM) instrument aboard our NASA Juno solar system exploration mission.”
The caption also explained the importance of yellow and red gradients. Areas shown in yellow are deeper in Jupiter’s atmosphere and are therefore hotter. Red regions are higher in Jupiter’s atmosphere and represent cooler areas.
The image was captured to depict “brightness temperature”, which is “a measure of radiance, at 5um, moving upward from the top of the atmosphere towards Juno”. Brightness temperature is expressed in temperature units, with the highest being 260K (approximately -13 degrees Celsius) and the lowest being approximately 190K (approximately -83 degrees Celsius).
The images were captured during Juno’s fourth pass over Jupiter on February 2, 2017.
The 14-second video has garnered over seven lakh views so far.
Here is the video released by NASA:
NASA regularly shares stunning images from outer space on its official Instagram page. Often, the space agency collects data from multiple telescopes and observatories to bring us stunning images of galaxies and stars. Recently, NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope released an image of a group of three galaxies, about 425 million light-years from Earth. In the image, the three galaxies seem to interact with each other. From the image, NASA said, it appeared that the two galaxies in the upper right resembled a spacecraft known as the USS Enterprise from the American sci-fi media franchise. star trek.
