PIA21641-Jupiter-SouthernStorms-JunoCam-20170525

For the first time the South Pole of Jupiter was photographed in detail by the

Juno spacecraft ''Juno'' is a NASA space probe orbiting the planet Jupiter. It was built by Lockheed Martin and is operated by NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The spacecraft was launched from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on August 5, 2011 UTC, as part ...

, which arrived to

Jupiter Jupiter is the fifth planet from the Sun and the List of Solar System objects by size, largest in the Solar System. It is a gas giant with a mass more than two and a half times that of all the other planets in the Solar System combined, but ...

in July 2016 and for the first time in history entered the

polar orbit A polar orbit is one in which a satellite passes above or nearly above both poles of the body being orbited (usually a planet such as the Earth, but possibly another body such as the Moon or Sun) on each revolution. It has an inclination of about ...

of Jupiter. At the same time, six cyclones were discovered at the South Pole: one in the center and five around it (their centers formed a close to regular pentagon), each about 4,500 km (2,800 mi.) in diameter, with a wind speed of about 360 km/h (220 mph), and all of them twisted clockwise. A similar picture at the North Pole of Jupiter presents nine cyclones of similar size: one in the center, and eight around it, rotating counterclockwise. For more than three years the structure of cyclones at both poles of the nearest to us

gas giant A gas giant is a giant planet composed mainly of hydrogen and helium. Gas giants are also called failed stars because they contain the same basic elements as a star. Jupiter and Saturn are the gas giants of the Solar System. The term "gas giant" ...

remained stable, but on November 3, 2019, on the 22nd rotation, "Juno" found the birth of a new cyclone at the South Pole: it quickly "pushed" the previous (although still has a smaller size, about 800 km), and now the centers of peripheral cyclones pole form almost right 6-corner. Before Juno, only the

Galileo Galileo di Vincenzo Bonaiuti de' Galilei (15 February 1564 – 8 January 1642) was an Italian astronomer, physicist and engineer, sometimes described as a polymath. Commonly referred to as Galileo, his name was pronounced (, ). He was ...

probe entered Jupiter's orbit from 1995 to 2003; however, its orbital inclination made it impossible to observe the polar regions of Jupiter; Cassini, which flew past Jupiter in 2000, also had no opportunity to photograph the polar regions. Thus, they remained "white spots" until 2016 (the images of the previous flyby missions and Earth telescopes had low resolution); however, back in 2000, the polar X-ray spots of Jupiter (the southern one is significantly weaker than the northern one) were detected. Jupiter's geographic South Pole is also the location of its magnetic South Pole (Jupiter does not have a well-defined magnetic North Pole).

References

{{Space-stub Jupiter Solar System Space