The Juno spacecraft from NASA captured an enigmatic lightning glow on Jupiter

A bizarre and fantastical lightning flash was captured by a NASA satellite within a whirling vortex on Jupiter. On June 16, NASA released a picture of a strange green lightning bolt that had been seen in one of the vortices that gather close to Jupiter’s north pole.

The biggest planet in the solar system is Jupiter. Scientists are attempting to decipher and comprehend many aspects of it, such as its violent storms and how lightning-like phenomena take place within the gas giant.

On Earth, hail is most common close to the equator and lightning strikes often come from water clouds. On Jupiter, however, the stickers arise from ammonia and water-derived clouds that regularly form around the poles.

The Juno spacecraft was launched in 2016 to study Jupiter and its moons, and on December 30, 2020, it will make its 31st close flyby of the gas giant. The spaceship photographed the cloud tops from a distance of around 19,900 miles.

In 2022, citizen scientist Kevin M. Gill created the final photos. He made advantage of the spacecraft’s JunoCam instrument’s raw data.

The scientist will be able to accurately grasp a larger comprehension of the planet and its unexplained properties thanks to Juno’s continuous examination.

To make sure that the spacecraft reaches the planet’s nightside in the coming months, Juno’s orbit around Jupiter is gradually getting closer to the gas giant. This will make it more likely that lightning will strike the gas giant.

“Along with continuously changing our orbit to allow new perspectives of Jupiter and flying low over the nightside of the planet, the spacecraft will also be threading the needle between some of Jupiter’s rings to learn more about their origin and composition,” said Matthew Johnson, project manager for the Juno mission at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

The Juno spacecraft is well-equipped with a number of sensors that may produce detections under Jupiter’s dense cloud cover in order to collect information about the planet’s weather patterns, atmosphere, and origin. The spacecraft on Jupiter has made close passes by three of its major moons, including the frozen ocean worlds of Europa and Ganymede and Io, the most volcanically active place in our solar system, during more than 50 flybys of Jupiter.

Our upcoming flybys in July and October will bring us even closer, leading up to our twin flyby encounters with Io in December of this year and February of next year, when we fly within 1,500 kilometres of its surface, according to Scott Bolton, the Juno mission’s principal investigator from the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. All of these flybys provide breathtaking views of this incredible moon’s volcanic activity. The facts ought to be astounding.