- 4/21/2025
NASA's Juno spacecraft is part of a cutting-edge mission to explore the mysteries of Jupiter; as this mighty probe is pummeled with deadly radiation, it gathers new data that could change everything we know about the solar system's biggest planet.
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LearningTranscript
00:00NASA's revolutionary Juno probe is on a daring voyage to Jupiter. Its goal? To reveal the deepest mysteries of our solar system.
00:13Everything we see in the solar system today is affected by Jupiter somehow, in the past or now.
00:21All the asteroids, all the planets, the moons, the comets, everything.
00:26So in many ways, Juno is actually giving us a view into the history of our planetary system, even the history of Earth.
00:33Juno's mission is risky.
00:36Jupiter could eat the spacecraft like that.
00:39But by diving perilously close to this monstrous world, Juno could change everything we know about our solar system.
00:48If you want to know what's happening, you've got to get up close in person.
00:56Independence Day, 2016.
01:11Juno arrives at Jupiter and gets to work.
01:15The probe angles its high-resolution camera towards this stormy world.
01:21Juno's snaps do not disappoint.
01:28The images returned from Juno are just beautiful.
01:34Juno's望 Rebellion
01:42numero Swami
01:43Suddenly, you have this magnificent mosaic of this planet.
01:48Juno…
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02:00ever views of Jupiter, a world 500 million miles away.
02:14But we didn't send Juno just to take pictures.
02:18One of its main goals is to peer deep into Jupiter's dark heart.
02:25One of the big questions we have about Jupiter is, does it have a core?
02:30And you'd think, well, of course it has a core.
02:31Like, every planet has a core.
02:33The Earth has a core.
02:34Everything does.
02:35Well, it turns out Jupiter might not.
02:40Knowing what lies at a planet's core allows scientists to wind back the clock billions
02:45of years to the formation of the planets.
02:50If Juno can reveal what lies deep within Jupiter, it could change our understanding of how the
02:56gas giant formed.
03:00If Juno finds a solid core, it could mean Jupiter first formed as a rocky planet like
03:06Earth, then kept growing.
03:09But if Juno finds no core, it could mean that Jupiter skipped the rocky stage and formed straight
03:17from a cloud of gas.
03:21Answering this question could shine a light on other mysteries, too.
03:25If we can figure out how Jupiter formed, we can figure out the rest of the story of the
03:31solar system.
03:34So how do you probe down into the interior of a planet when all you can really see are
03:39the very tops of the clouds?
03:41Well, incredibly, you can use gravity.
03:42As Juno orbits Jupiter, it can sense, in its orbit, tiny little variations in the gravitational
03:53pole of Jupiter.
03:56As Juno speeds around Jupiter, gravitational spikes tug on the craft.
04:01Turns out, some parts of Jupiter are denser than others.
04:05If Jupiter were some solid ball, then as Juno passes by it, as it passes very close above
04:11its cloud tops, the orbit, the trajectory, would be very smooth.
04:16But in fact, if Jupiter has layers or places where there's more mass and places where there's
04:21less, then it's going to pull on Juno a little bit differently.
04:25Passing over areas of concentrated mass gives Juno a speed boost.
04:32So what they do is, the engineers back on Earth can basically just say, how fast is it
04:37moving right now?
04:38How about now?
04:39How about now?
04:40And you build up a map of where the mass is in Jupiter underneath the spacecraft as it
04:46passes around.
04:50Juno's instruments begin to map out the heart of the gas giant.
04:54What Juno found was this amorphous mass, a fuzzy thing, in the center of Jupiter.
05:05It's not as solid as we expected if it were just a metal and rock core, but there is something
05:11there.
05:13In the center of the planet, Juno detects hydrogen and rocky material, dissolved and blended together.
05:20It's a type of planetary core we've never seen before.
05:26Astronomers describe it as fuzzy.
05:29We thought we were going to find an avocado.
05:31Instead, we found a bowl of chili.
05:33It's a hydrogen fluid chili con carne.
05:40So none of our models of the interior of Jupiter turned out to be correct.
05:44That means we have to go back to the drawing board.
05:48One theory is that Jupiter didn't form from rocks or gas, but from tiny pebbles less than
05:55an inch wide, strewn across the early solar system 4.6 billion years ago.
06:02These pebbles came together.
06:03They accreted to form a massive object that was the sort of seed, the core of Jupiter.
06:11The swarm of pebbles clumped together to form one giant core, 20 times the mass of Earth.
06:18But these pebbles can't sustain this growing planet for long.
06:23Eventually, we need to make a jump from those centimeter-sized particles up to really large
06:27things, like 100-kilometer planetesimals, to really kickstart growth of a planet.
06:35As Jupiter grows, its appetite becomes insatiable.
06:39The cores of other would-be planets are drawn in by its immense pull and absorb on impact,
06:46causing Jupiter's core to transform.
06:51Huge chunks of incoming rock are mixed up with gas and the pebbles that originally built the core.
06:58We think that the core material that might have been there is actually dissolved and mixed in
07:04with the rest of the planet.
07:05This mix of rock, gas, and pebbles leaves the core in a strange state, somewhere between
07:12solid and liquid, or, in other words, fuzzy.
07:17Once Jupiter's core reaches a critical mass, its gravity pulls in all nearby hydrogen gas,
07:25building the Jovian atmosphere and leaving the fuzzy core, trapped beneath thousands of miles
07:32of thick clouds.
07:33And that is what formed Jupiter as we know and love it today.
07:39Juno's discovery of Jupiter's fuzzy core could rewrite the book on Jupiter's early years.
07:45But Juno is just getting started.
07:48We haven't even scratched the surface of the number of mysteries there are.
07:53There's more to Jupiter than meets the eye, as Juno's instruments begin to reveal a darker
08:00side to this giant world.
08:03Jupiter's environment is one of the most vicious in the solar system, and that's because of its
08:09incredibly strong magnetic field.
08:12And Juno is caught right in the middle of it.
08:23The gas giant Jupiter holds clues to the mysteries of our solar system, and in 2011, NASA launched
08:39a billion-dollar mission to uncover them.
08:41Three, two, one, ignition, and liftoff of the Atlas V with Juno on a trek to Jupiter.
08:53To reach its target, Juno embarks on a five-year journey.
08:57Sending any spacecraft to another planet is going to be tough, but sending one to Jupiter
09:05is really pushing things pretty hard.
09:10Juno weaves through the solar system with extreme precision.
09:15The craft battles violent temperature changes and navigates carefully through the asteroid belt.
09:20If there's a fleck of dust in your path, and that thing slams into your spacecraft, it could
09:26do significant damage.
09:281.7 billion miles into its mission, Juno finally nears its target.
09:36But the probe is hurtling towards Jupiter at 165,000 miles an hour.
09:42Juno is moving really fast.
09:45It's one of the fastest spacecraft ever.
09:46You need to go fast enough to get there, but then you need to be slow enough to be captured
09:51by the gravity of that planet.
09:53You need to get it just right.
09:55Entering orbit around Jupiter is the trickiest part of the mission.
09:59Get it wrong, and Juno could slam into the planet, or drift out into deep space.
10:06To successfully get Juno to enter a stable orbit around Jupiter is almost the same as, say,
10:12shooting a basketball from London and having it land on the front of the rim in New York
10:16and just sitting there balanced.
10:19I could do it, but can NASA do it with Juno?
10:27NASA has a neat game plan.
10:29Juno performs a backflip in space and fires its thruster towards Jupiter.
10:35Everything is going smoothly.
10:37We're continuing to burn and change our velocity.
10:41The rocket burns for 35 nail-biting minutes, reducing the craft's speed by 1,200 miles an hour.
10:55Finally, the probe achieves orbits around Jupiter.
10:59Right on July 4th during the fireworks, we just got into orbit.
11:02In many ways, we're firing our rocket motor.
11:05I mean, it is fireworks.
11:09Safe in orbit, Juno turns its instruments to the planet for a crucial part of the mission,
11:16investigating Jupiter's magnetic field.
11:22Deep below the stormy surface, liquid metallic hydrogen flows endlessly around the planet,
11:29producing a huge magnetic field.
11:31This magnetosphere stretches over 600 million miles beyond the planet, reaching all the way to Saturn.
11:41If your eyes could actually see Jupiter's magnetosphere and you tried to look at it while standing on Earth,
11:48it would look about as big in the sky as the moon.
11:50And within this magnetic field, Juno faces an invisible threat.
11:59Jupiter has an enormous magnetic field.
12:02It is so enormous in terms of space, but also in terms of power.
12:07High-energy particles from the sun are funneled into deadly radiation belts, guided by the giant planet's magnetic field.
12:17The magnetic field traps charged particles coming from the sun and circulates them around that system and just bombards anything in the vicinity,
12:30including our fragile little spacecraft.
12:33Closer to the planet, radiation levels are up to 30 times greater than they were inside the reactor core room during the Chernobyl disaster.
12:43This is radiation. This is bad news.
12:47These particles, they would hit you, they would rupture your DNA, rupture your cell structures, and you would die.
12:54This blistering radiation is bad news for the spacecraft as well.
13:01The charged particles threaten to destroy electronic and navigational systems.
13:06But Juno has armored up.
13:09It's not some delicate, beautiful, gossamer thing that you are sending to orbit Jupiter.
13:16It's more like a tank. You have to protect this thing, or else it's not going to last very long at all.
13:24We've got a couple hundred pounds of titanium on the spacecraft just trying to shield us from what Jupiter might throw at us.
13:32So it is, in a sense, we're like an armored tank going into war.
13:36Lightweight titanium is tough.
13:40Juno's half-inch-thick shielding blocks 99% of Jupiter's vicious radiation.
13:48But even at this reduced rate, Juno can't survive the bombardment for long.
13:52So the craft sets itself on a unique orbit around the gas giant.
13:59It actually has a very long orbit where it spends most of its time far away.
14:04And then everyone so dives in, goes, oh, hot, hot, hot, hot, hot, too much, and then goes safely away to communicate and process, and then back in again.
14:13Juno takes a mighty gamble, diving deep into these radiation belts to achieve one of its key objectives, mapping Jupiter's giant magnetic field.
14:27And as Juno swoops around the planet, it reveals something scientists have never seen before.
14:34When you look at the Earth, we have a fairly simple magnetic field.
14:39It's like a giant bar magnet with a north and a south magnetic pole.
14:43Well, Jupiter has that as well.
14:45This is called a dipolar field.
14:47It's got two poles.
14:48But it also has a third pole.
14:51Juno's magnetic field maps show a north and south pole and a bizarre magnetic disturbance at the equator.
15:00And it's like Jupiter just sprouted a third arm, and that's kind of mysterious.
15:07On magnetic field maps, north poles show up red and south poles blue.
15:12So scientists are calling this second south pole the great blue spot.
15:17Everyone knows about the great red spot, but Jupiter now has a great blue spot as well.
15:24This magnetic disturbance reflects Jupiter's stormy interior.
15:28You have these fast-moving winds blowing on the magnetic field, and they're actually shearing it apart and moving the field around.
15:36It's not necessarily a storm, although it could be.
15:39It maybe is better to think of it as a magnetic storm.
15:44Turbulence inside Jupiter could be twisting up the magnetic field to drive the great blue spot
15:51and the deadly radiation belts that Juno must navigate through.
15:56Unlike Earth, Jupiter is not really a solid mass for the most part.
16:01So all of its clouds and gases are moving at slightly different rates.
16:06And that actually makes the magnetic field that's generated be very variable and highly changing.
16:13For us to have a variable magnetic field like Jupiter does, the entire Earth would have to be molten.
16:19We really don't want that to happen.
16:21With each orbit, Juno unravels more mysteries of this giant planet.
16:27But Jupiter's deepest secret could shine a light on our own origins.
16:32If we want to understand the Earth and our place in the solar system,
16:35Juno has found a lot of those mysteries are locked up there in Jupiter.
16:39The Juno spacecraft is uncovering the secrets of Jupiter from its swirling cloud tops to its dark heart.
17:02But Juno's discoveries go beyond the gas giant itself.
17:06They could also solve mysteries surrounding our own planet.
17:12Jupiter is the key to the formation of the solar system,
17:17which means it's the key to understanding how the Earth formed.
17:21Juno is actually giving us a view into the history of our planetary system, even the history of Earth.
17:26There's these distinct zones of the solar system, rocky and metallic in the inner part.
17:32Hydrogen gas and cosmic dust collapses, sparking nuclear fusion.
17:37From the resulting chaos, one star, four rocky worlds, and four gassy giants are born and form our solar system.
17:49There's these distinct zones of the solar system, rocky and metallic in the inner part, gaseous and water-rich in the outer part.
17:58And even without thinking about that too hard, it kind of makes sense because in close to the sun, it's warmer.
18:05Out farther away from the sun, it's cooler.
18:07But the Earth breaks the mold.
18:12Our planet has far more water than theories predict.
18:17The Earth formed in a part of the solar system that you'd think normally should be probably pretty dry because it was pretty close to the sun.
18:23Our planet is just 150 million miles from the sun, putting us inside what scientists call the snow line.
18:33Inside this line, the sun is powerful enough to evaporate water during a planet's formation.
18:42Inside the snow line, the temperatures are high and there's a lot of energy from the sun nearby.
18:47Too close to the sun, those gaseous and ice-rich materials just can't exist.
18:52They're evaporated away by the heat of the sun.
18:55Our watery world should be a dry rock in space.
19:01Understanding how water got to the Earth is so important because it wouldn't be there in the very, very beginning.
19:07But Jupiter could hold the answer to this mystery.
19:12To solve the riddle of Earth's water, Juno aims to discover where our Jupiter was born.
19:18Understanding how and where and when Jupiter formed is critical because it has really dominated the entire evolution of the solar system.
19:28It's the biggest planet by far.
19:30It's the biggest thing out there that's moving everything around.
19:33Any water in the early solar system could have been moved around by Jupiter's mighty gravity.
19:40So if Juno can trace the history of this giant planet, that could explain why we find H2O where it's least expected.
19:48We know that planets can move closer to the sun and farther out while they're forming and even after they form.
19:55So how do we figure out where Jupiter formed?
19:59The key is how much water is locked up inside Jupiter.
20:03If we can understand how Jupiter built a relationship with water, we can understand how water got distributed all throughout the solar system, including here on Earth.
20:16If Juno can measure the water content of Jupiter, it will solve a 20-year-old mystery.
20:23When it did, it was able to measure the atmosphere around it and detect water.
20:41And the thing is, it didn't.
20:43It didn't find any.
20:44And that's weird.
20:46Everything was bone dry.
20:48So why in the world did Jupiter's atmosphere look dry?
20:51If the results from the Galileo probe are correct, then 4.6 billion years ago, Jupiter formed closer to the sun.
21:01But that's not the whole story.
21:0420 years later, NASA sends Juno to get a second opinion.
21:10Juno is an orbiter, and so it is loaded with instruments and detectors to look down on Jupiter and try to figure out everything that's going on.
21:17Juno doesn't have to risk its life to hunt for water.
21:23The craft peers through Jupiter's thick clouds using a microwave radiometer to detect H2O from a safe distance.
21:32Using these microwaves, Juno builds up a global map of Jupiter's water.
21:37What Juno has found is, yeah, there's plenty of water in Jupiter.
21:43It's just that Galileo happened to hit a dry spot.
21:46But in fact, if it had come in almost anywhere else, it would have seen plenty of water.
21:53Juno's findings may give a clue to where Jupiter originally formed.
21:58It seems apparent now that Jupiter didn't form in its present location.
22:06The leading theory is that Jupiter formed just beyond the snow line, the boundary between the dry inner solar system and the wet outer solar system.
22:16But we find Jupiter is twice as far away from the sun as where that original snow line would have been.
22:22So this is telling us something interesting.
22:24Jupiter may have wandered from its original position, causing unimaginable chaos.
22:32As Jupiter moved around, things got hit and knocked out of the solar system.
22:37It essentially scatters everything in its path.
22:40It's the biggest player. It's the biggest planet.
22:42Everything moves for it.
22:44As Jupiter bulldozes toward the outer solar system, it slings ice-rich asteroids and comets in, towards the sun, and towards the earth.
22:59Jupiter would literally, in some sense, have snow plowed into the inner solar system,
23:05a whole wave of water-rich planetesimals that would have delivered much of our earth's oceans.
23:10Juno has helped answer why our earth is habitable, despite being so close to the sun.
23:17So it was worth going all that distance, sending Juno all the way out there to get that closer look.
23:26Juno continues to explore Jupiter's mysteries and its famous features.
23:32There is nothing more iconic about Jupiter than the Great Red Spot.
23:37And Juno reveals that this 300-year-old cyclone may soon vanish.
23:43Our solar system plays host to some epic natural wonders.
24:01The ice geysers of Enceladus.
24:03The giant rings of Saturn.
24:06The Martian megavolcano, Olympus Mons.
24:09But in July of 2017, NASA's Juno probe skims the surface of Jupiter
24:16and photographs the most famous natural wonder.
24:22A fierce, hurricane-like storm that's been raging for hundreds of years.
24:28When you think of Jupiter, one of the most visually stunning, most iconic features of the atmosphere is that Great Red Spot.
24:36There is nothing like Jupiter's Red Spot in our entire solar system.
24:42As Juno soars over the Great Red Spot, it looks down onto a storm over 10,000 miles across.
24:49This is the most extreme storm.
24:55The winds are blowing continuously at 400 miles an hour.
24:59On Earth, the most powerful Category 5 hurricanes can unleash almost total destruction.
25:06But these are less than half as powerful as the storm on Jupiter.
25:11The Great Red Spot is the greatest hurricane that you've ever imagined.
25:15But that's not all.
25:18Juno's microwave radiometer allows scientists to see through Jupiter's cloud layers for the first time.
25:26Juno has instrumentation that's able to look underneath.
25:30So one of the things we did was we looked at how deep are the roots.
25:33Juno peers down into the eye of this monster storm.
25:37It spots temperature changes far below the surface that follow the storm's iconic shape,
25:43tracing the roots of the Great Red Spot deep into the Jovian atmosphere.
25:49They found out that it goes down over 200 miles deep into the atmosphere.
25:54There's nothing like that on Earth.
25:56The greatest cyclones of our own planet can reach heights of around 10 miles.
26:05But Jupiter's Great Red Spot is over 20 times taller.
26:10I think that really brings into perspective the massive scale of this planet.
26:18Jupiter's vast, turbulent atmosphere hosts the deepest storm mankind has ever seen.
26:24And Juno's discoveries get scientists wondering.
26:28Could the Great Red Spot help explain another of Jupiter's mysteries?
26:34The planet's surprisingly warm atmosphere?
26:39Jupiter lurks out in our outer solar system, where everything is very cold.
26:44The sun is very dim when you get that far away.
26:47Jupiter is five times farther from the sun than we are.
26:50So it's only getting 4% of the amount of energy from the sun that we do.
26:55But there's something heating up the atmosphere of Jupiter.
26:57There are parts of it that are many times warmer than we can explain with sunlight.
27:02The question is, of course, where is that energy coming from?
27:06Juno swoops in for another pass on Jupiter,
27:09turning its high-resolution cameras on the raging storm below.
27:13The storm unleashes vicious turbulence into the surrounding atmosphere,
27:20giving scientists the clue they need to explain the planet's high temperature.
27:26The Great Red Spot is a giant hurricane that's powered by heat deep in the core of Jupiter.
27:33But it has such violent and chaotic motion, it's mixing up the atmosphere around it.
27:40The thunderstorms on Jupiter are going to be generating booming thunder,
27:47just the same way that they do here on the Earth.
27:52Thunderclouds send sound waves rippling through the storm.
27:55A sound wave is a wave of pressure, of compression,
28:04where air molecules or water molecules get compacted.
28:09They get squeezed together.
28:10And when you squeeze something together, they're a lot closer together,
28:14and they're going to get pretty hot.
28:15These sound waves shoot up 500 miles above the storm,
28:23where they break, converting sound energy into heat.
28:27These sound waves, they crash together,
28:31creating a tremendous amount of energy and heating the gases around them.
28:34Jupiter's Great Red Spot has helped heat the Jovian atmosphere for hundreds of years.
28:42But new images suggest that this may be about to change.
28:48Jupiter's Red Spot is so big.
28:50I mean, it's bigger than Earth by a long shot.
28:53It seems like it would be an incredibly stable thing.
28:56It's just there, and it's always been there, and it always will be.
29:00Recently, we've seen it changing.
29:02When NASA's Voyager Space Probe visited Jupiter in 1979,
29:08it observed a storm twice the diameter of Earth.
29:15In 2017, Juno's images show the Great Red Spot has lost a third of its width.
29:22But that's not all.
29:24Despite the storm shrinking, it's actually getting taller.
29:28The Great Red Spot is being stretched and forced into Jupiter's upper atmosphere.
29:34The storms in the Great Red Spot is kind of like the clay on a potter's wheel,
29:39where as you bring your hands closer together to draw the clay in,
29:42the closer your hands are, the taller the pottery becomes.
29:45And similarly for the storm, as it becomes smaller at the base,
29:49it raises taller toward the upper atmosphere.
29:53It's getting taller.
29:54And we see storms do the same thing on Earth,
29:56and when it does that, the wind shear will actually take the top of the storm off
30:00and drag it apart.
30:01And so we'll be watching it very intently over the next few years
30:04to see if that's what happens on Jupiter as well.
30:06It may be only a matter of time before Jupiter's high-altitude winds
30:13tear this iconic storm to shreds.
30:16The most famous storm of the solar system may soon disappear,
30:20but Juno reveals other storms hidden in the strangest of places.
30:26The storm in the Great Red Spot is one,
30:29but not the only, giant storm that's happening on Jupiter.
30:32NASA's Juno probe has traveled billions of miles across the solar system
30:54to reveal the mysteries of gas giant Jupiter.
30:59But there's one part of Jupiter that has remained hidden
31:02until now.
31:05Before Juno, our view of Jupiter was very limited.
31:07We'd never actually flown over the poles.
31:10It's something that's very hard to do on Jupiter.
31:12We don't have other missions that have done this.
31:15In August of 2016,
31:18Juno's flight plan takes the spacecraft into unknown territory
31:21to reveal Jupiter's mysterious polar regions for the first time.
31:26When the first time we looked at the pole,
31:30it didn't look anything like the Jupiter we knew.
31:35We never would have guessed that was Jupiter
31:37if somebody had shown that to us.
31:38Juno's camera reveals a strange blue expanse that puzzles scientists.
31:48The electric color could be due to chemical changes in the clouds
31:52brought on by a lack of sunlight.
31:54But what Juno spots inside the blue clouds is even stranger.
32:03Giant central cyclones spin around each pole at 200 miles an hour
32:08with these cyclones surrounded by eight stormy vortices in the north
32:14and five in the south.
32:18There are these weird cyclones,
32:20gigantic swirls, vortices of gas swirling around Jupiter's poles,
32:25and they're clearly forming patterns.
32:28It's hard to get a sense of scale here.
32:31Now, the north polar central cyclone,
32:33that one right at the pole,
32:34that's 2,500 miles across.
32:37That is almost as big as the continental United States.
32:40What is going on there?
32:42This is nothing like what we see on Earth.
32:47On Earth, our weather is driven by heat from the sun.
32:52It hits our planet at the equator and flows across the surface.
32:57Powerful cyclones form over tropical waters
33:00and move around the planet.
33:04But the polar regions receive less energy from the sun,
33:07so cyclones can't form at the poles.
33:10We see that if you're at the equator, it's warmer and it's stormier.
33:15If you're at the poles where the sun is slightly harder to see,
33:18that activity goes away.
33:21But the weather on Jupiter couldn't be more different.
33:24We see lightning and convective thunderstorms at the poles of Jupiter,
33:28but not at the equator.
33:30And that's sort of the opposite of what we see on the Earth.
33:32The question is, what's driving Jupiter's storms?
33:36Jupiter is five times further away from the sun than the Earth
33:40and receives only a fraction of the sun's energy.
33:43Unlike Earth, Jupiter's polar regions seem to be where the action is.
33:50Something is driving the planet's weird weather.
33:54Juno's scans of the giant planet's thermal emissions
33:57suggest it could be Jupiter itself.
34:01We can actually see the internal heat of Jupiter coming right up through,
34:06and so Jupiter will look very bright in areas where we can see that heat.
34:09Juno detects searing heat beneath Jupiter's cloud bands.
34:16Jupiter has so much material, so much mass, so much gravity,
34:20that the interior is incredibly dense and very, very hot.
34:24At the core, it's probably many thousands of degrees hotter
34:26than the surface of the sun.
34:29This fiery inferno buried in Jupiter's dark heart
34:33is a relic from its birth billions of years ago.
34:37The violent collisions that formed the planet
34:40left its core seething hot,
34:43a heat that remains to this day,
34:46buried under thousands of miles of insulating gas.
34:50As the heat slowly leaks outward,
34:53Jupiter's fast-rotating atmosphere
34:55creates vicious cyclones and thunderstorms.
34:59That's what's really driving most of the weather.
35:02It's not the sun, it's Jupiter itself.
35:04And as Juno soars over the planet,
35:09it reveals another weather mystery.
35:12The craft detects bursts of radio waves
35:16spiking up to four times a second.
35:19The telltale sign of ferocious lightning strikes.
35:25Clouds are moving around in the atmosphere,
35:27building up electric charge,
35:28and causing bolts of lightning to form.
35:31And we've actually seen this with the Juno spacecraft.
35:33These are megastorms,
35:37orders of magnitude bigger than here on Earth.
35:43And Juno finds there's more to these thunderclouds
35:46than just flashes of light.
35:50Giant, icy hailstones of water and ammonia,
35:54the chemical which gives Jupiter's clouds
35:56their orange color.
35:58High up in Jupiter's atmosphere,
36:03the ammonia is mixing with the water.
36:07And it becomes a liquid ball
36:09that starts to collect ice around it.
36:11And it will fall like hail does,
36:14deep into Jupiter's atmosphere.
36:16On Earth,
36:18hail falls to the ground and melts.
36:20But on Jupiter,
36:21there is no ground.
36:25It gets lifted in the atmosphere
36:27because of an updraft
36:28and then more ice
36:29and it builds bigger
36:30and then it falls down
36:31and then it gets carried back up.
36:33And so hail is often many layers being built.
36:38These ice balls grow layer by layer
36:40as they soar up and down the atmosphere.
36:43If they formed in storms here on Earth,
36:47they'd cause some serious damage.
36:50So if you were buzzing around Jupiter
36:53and you were near where these storms were,
36:55you might get hit by hail coming up
36:57or going down.
37:00This is one of the most violent,
37:02energetic atmospheres
37:04in the entire solar system.
37:07Juno is revealing the secrets
37:10that Jupiter has hidden for decades.
37:12including the mystery
37:14of Jupiter's northern lights.
37:17When Juno studied
37:19the lights coming from the aurora on Jupiter,
37:22it found that something really weird is going on.
37:42On Earth, dazzling auroras light up the skies
37:46as charged particles from the sun
37:48interact with atoms high in the atmosphere.
37:54Deep in the outer solar system,
37:56Jupiter is too far from the sun
37:58for strong auroras to form in this way.
38:01But high above the giant planet's poles,
38:05Juno spots a seemingly impossible light show.
38:09The auroras of Jupiter are tremendously larger
38:14than the ones that we find here on Earth.
38:16In fact, the auroral rings near the poles
38:18are bigger than our planet itself.
38:20Jupiter's auroras emit primarily ultraviolet
38:23and X-ray light,
38:24so you can't see it with the naked human eye.
38:26But if you could see them
38:28and you were at Jupiter,
38:29that would be an amazing light show
38:32because those auroras are strong.
38:37These glowing displays are evidence
38:40of charged particles
38:41slamming into Jupiter's atmosphere.
38:45But if they're not coming from the sun,
38:48where are they coming from?
38:50Hunting for an answer,
38:51Juno snaps an image of Jupiter's southern lights
38:54with its ultraviolet imaging spectrometer.
38:57Here, inside the aurora,
39:01it glimpses something strange.
39:03When Juno studied the lights
39:06coming from the aurora on Jupiter,
39:08it found that they were
39:09even stronger than expected.
39:11And in fact,
39:12when you look at Jupiter's poles
39:14in wavelengths that our eyes can't see,
39:16for example, ultraviolet,
39:17you see a hot spot.
39:20This hot spot marks the point
39:22where huge concentrations
39:24of charged particles
39:25strike Jupiter's atmosphere.
39:29Tracing their trajectory
39:30reveals the culprit
39:31of Jupiter's dazzling light shows,
39:34the volcanoes of Jupiter's moons.
39:39Jupiter's moon Io
39:40has hundreds of active volcanoes
39:42spewing out materials
39:44way out into space,
39:45and many of those get trapped
39:46by the magnetic field of Jupiter.
39:49Io's volcanoes
39:50fire out jets of charged particles,
39:53which are swept up
39:54by the giant planet's magnetic field.
39:57It's funneling those particles down
39:59and slamming into specific spots
40:01in Jupiter's atmosphere.
40:03But Io isn't the only moon
40:06responsible for Jupiter's polar light show.
40:09If we go further out,
40:10Europa, Ganymede, Callisto,
40:13those are more icy,
40:14don't necessarily have volcanoes.
40:17These icy moons
40:18twist up Jupiter's magnetic field
40:20in their own way.
40:22Some of these moons
40:23have magnetic fields
40:24that interact with Jupiter's magnetic field,
40:26and that actually intensifies
40:28the aurora display on Jupiter.
40:32Jupiter's moons work together
40:33to energize the greatest auroras
40:36in the solar system.
40:38But in these beautiful displays
40:40is a stark reminder
40:41of the danger Juno faces.
40:45When you look at these pictures
40:46of the aurora on Jupiter,
40:47and you think,
40:48oh, that's beautiful,
40:48wouldn't it be great
40:49to see that in person?
40:50The answer is,
40:51no, no it wouldn't,
40:52because they will kill you.
40:54What's causing these displays
40:56are subatomic particles
40:58accelerated to tremendously high speeds
41:00by the magnetic fields involved.
41:03The radiation around Jupiter
41:05is lethal,
41:06and not just for humans.
41:09The lifetime of the Juno mission
41:10is very limited
41:11by the extreme conditions
41:13it has to survive in.
41:14We think that in the future,
41:16a lot of the instruments
41:16will be so radiated,
41:18they won't really work anymore.
41:21When Juno's titanium armor
41:23finally fails,
41:24Jupiter's deadly radiation
41:25will damage the craft
41:27beyond repair.
41:29So the team
41:30plan to go out with a bang,
41:33thrusting Juno
41:34into Jupiter's atmosphere,
41:36where the craft
41:37will be torn to pieces.
41:39Eventually,
41:40it'll be drawn down
41:42into Jupiter's depths
41:43and become a part
41:44of the planet itself.
41:46But before then,
41:48Juno has many more mysteries
41:49to unlock.
41:51We'll answer some questions,
41:53and we'll raise some more.
41:54That's what I expect.
41:56And we'll get
41:56some fantastic images.
41:59Every single thing
42:00has turned out
42:01to be a surprise.
42:03There are so many things
42:04that Juno has opened
42:05our eyes to
42:05that I can't imagine
42:06having not sent it.
42:07So we're in for
42:09at least a year more
42:10of the most profound
42:11surprises about Jupiter.
42:13What we're learning,
42:15what we're unlocking,
42:17not just about Jupiter,
42:18but the formation
42:19of the solar system
42:20and the potential
42:21formation of life
42:22itself here on Earth.
42:25It's mind-blowing.
42:26That's all.
Recommended
42:29
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