NASA's revolutionary Juno probe
is on a daring voyage to Jupiter.
Its goal... to reveal the the deepest mysteries
of our solar system.
Everything we see in the solar system today
is affected by Jupiter somehow in the past or now,
all the asteroids, all the planets,
the moons, the comets, everything.
So in many ways, Juno is actually giving us a view
into the history of our planetary system,
even the history of Earth.
Juno's mission is risky.
Jupiter could eat the spacecraft like that.
But by diving perilously close
to this monstrous world,
Juno could change everything we know about our solar system.
If you want to know what's happening,
you got to get up close and personal.
Captions by vitac... www.vitac.com
captions paid for by discovery communications
Independence day, 2016...
Juno arrives at Jupiter
and gets to work.
The probe angles its high-resolution camera
towards this stormy world.
Juno's snaps do not disappoint.
The images returned from Juno are just beautiful.
Suddenly you have this magnificent mosaic
of this planet.
As a human being, I'm like, "oh, my gosh, look at this.
This is amazing. This is coming back from Jupiter."
These are the closest-ever views
of Jupiter, a world 500 million miles away.
But we didn't send Juno just to take pictures.
One of its main goals is to peer deep into Jupiter's dark heart.
One of the big questions we have about Jupiter is,
does it have a core?
And you'd think, well, of course it has a core
like every planet has a core.
The Earth has a core. Everything does.
Well, it turns out, Jupiter might not.
Knowing what lies at a planet's core
allows scientists to wind back the clock billions of years
to the formation of the planets.
If Juno can reveal what lies deep within Jupiter,
it could change our understanding
of how the gas giant formed.
If Juno finds a solid core, it could mean
Jupiter first formed as a rocky planet like earth
then kept growing,
but if Juno finds no core,
it could mean that Jupiter skipped the rocky stage
and formed straight from a cloud of gas.
Answering this question could shine a light
on other mysteries, too.
If we can figure out how Jupiter formed,
we can figure out the rest of the story of the solar system.
So how do you probe down into the interior of a planet
when all you can really see are the very tops of the clouds?
Well, incredibly, you can use gravity.
As Juno orbits Jupiter,
it can sense in its orbit
tiny little variations
in the gravitational pull of Jupiter.
As Juno speeds around Jupiter,
gravitational spikes tug on the craft.
Turns out, some parts of Jupiter are denser than others.
If Jupiter were some solid ball, then as Juno passes by it,
as it passes very close above its cloud tops,
the orbit, the trajectory would be very smooth,
but in fact, if Jupiter has layers,
or places where there is more mass
and places where there's less, then it's gonna pull on Juno
a little bit differently.
Passing over areas of concentrated mass
gives Juno a speed boost.
So what they do is, the engineers back on earth
can basically just say,
"how fast is it moving right now?
How about now? How about now?"
And you build up a map of where the mass is in Jupiter
underneath the spacecraft as it passes around.
Juno's instruments begin to map out
the heart of gas giant,
revealing the mysterious core for the first time.
What Juno found was this amorphous mass,
a fuzzy thing in the center of Jupiter.
It's not as solid as we expected
if it were just a metal and rock core,
but there is something there.
In the center of the planet,
Juno detects hydrogen and rocky material
dissolved and blended together.
It's a type of planetary core we've never seen before.
Astronomers describe it as fuzzy.
We thought we were gonna find an avocado.
Instead, we found a bowl of chili.
It's a hydrogen fluid chili con carne.
So none of our models of the interior of Jupiter
turned out to be correct.
That means we have to go back to the drawing board.
One theory is that Jupiter
didn't form from rocks or gas
but from tiny pebbles less than an inch wide strewn
across the early solar system 4.6 billion years ago.
These pebbles came together.
They accreted to form a massive object
that was the sort of seed, the core of Jupiter.
The swarm of pebbles
clumped together to form one giant core
20 times the mass of Earth,
but these pebbles can't sustain this growing planet for long.
Eventually, we need to make a jump
from those centimeter-size particles
up to really large things, like 100-kilometer planetesimals,
to really kick-start growth of a planet.
As Jupiter grows, its appetite becomes insatiable.
The cores of other would-be planets are drawn in
by its immense pull and absorb on impact,
causing Jupiter's core to transform.
Huge chunks of incoming rock are mixed up with gas
and the pebbles that originally built the core.
We think that core material that might've been there is actually
dissolved and mixed in with the rest of the planet.
This mix of rock, gas, and pebbles
leaves the core in a strange state
somewhere between solid and liquid
or, in other words, fuzzy.
Once Jupiter's core reaches a critical mass,
its gravity pulls in all nearby hydrogen gas,
building the Jovian atmosphere
and leaving the fuzzy core
trapped beneath thousands of miles of thick clouds.
And that is what formed Jupiter as we know and love it today.
Juno's discovery of Jupiter's fuzzy core
could rewrite the book on
Jupiter's early years, but Juno is just getting started.
We haven't even scratched the surface
of the number of mysteries there are.
There's more to Jupiter than meets the eye
as Juno's instruments begin to reveal a darker side
to this giant world.
Jupiter's environment is one of the most vicious
in the solar system, and that's because
of its incredibly strong magnetic field.
And Juno is caught right in the middle of it.
The gas giant Jupiter
holds clues to the mysteries of our solar system,
and in 2011,
NASA launched a billion-dollar mission to uncover them.
Three, two, one, ignition.
And liftoff of the Atlas V
with Juno on a trek to Jupiter.
To reach its target,
Juno embarks on a five-year journey.
Sending any spacecraft to another planet
is gonna be tough, but sending one to Jupiter
is really pushing things pretty hard.
Juno weaves through the solar system
with extreme precision.
The craft battles violent temperature changes
and navigates carefully through the asteroid belt.
If there's a fleck of dust in your path
and that thing slams into your spacecraft,
it could do significant damage.
1.7 billion miles into its mission,
Juno finally nears its target,
but the probe is hurtling towards Jupiter
at 165,000 miles an hour.
Juno is moving really fast.
It's one of the fastest spacecraft ever.
You need to go fast enough to get there, but then you need
to be slow enough to be captured by the gravity of the planet.
You need to get it just right.
Entering orbit around
Jupiter is the trickiest part of the mission.
Get it wrong and Juno could slam into the planet
or drift out into deep space.
To successfully get Juno to enter a stable orbit around
Jupiter as almost the same as, say,
shooting a basketball from London
and having it on the land on the front of the rim in New York
and just sitting there balanced.
I could do it, but can NASA do it with Juno?
NASA has a neat game plan.
Juno performs a backflip in space
and fires its thruster towards Jupiter.
Everything is going smoothly.
We're continuing to burn and change our velocity.
The rocket burns for 35 nail-biting minutes,
reducing the craft's speed by 1,200 miles an hour.
Finally, the probe achieves orbit around Jupiter.
Right on July 4th during the fireworks
we just got into orbit.
In many ways, we're firing a rocket motor.
I mean, it is fireworks.
Safe in orbit,
Juno turns its instruments to the planet
for a crucial part of the mission...
investigating Jupiter's magnetic field.
Deep below the stormy surface, liquid metallic hydrogen
flows endlessly around the planet,
producing a huge magnetic field.
This magnetosphere stretches over 600 million miles
beyond the planet, reaching all the way to Saturn.
If your eyes could actually see Jupiter's magnetosphere
and you tried to look at it while standing on earth,
it would look about as big in the sky as the moon.
And within this magnetic field,
Juno faces an invisible threat.
Jupiter has an enormous magnetic field.
It is so enormous in terms of space,
but also in terms of power.
High-energy particles from the Sun
are funneled into deadly radiation belts
guided by the giant planet's magnetic field.
The magnetic field traps charged particles coming from the Sun
and circulates them around that system
and just bombards anything in the vicinity,
including our fragile little spacecraft.
Closer to the planet,
radiation levels are up to 30 times greater
than they were inside the reactor core room
during the Chernobyl disaster.
This is radiation.
This is bad news.
These particles, they would hit you.
They would rupture your DNA, rupture your cell structures,
and you would die.
This blistering radiation is bad news
for the spacecraft as well.
The charged particles threaten to destroy electronic
and navigational systems, but Juno has armored up.
It's not some delicate, beautiful, gossamer thing
that you are sending to orbit Jupiter.
It's more like a tank.
You have to protect this thing or else
it's not going to last very long at all.
We've got a couple hundred pounds of titanium
on the spacecraft just trying to shield us
from what Jupiter might throw at us,
so it is in a sense we're like an armored tank going into war.
Lightweight titanium is tough.
Juno's 1/2-inch-thick shielding blocks 99%
of Jupiter's vicious radiation.
But even at this reduced rate,
Juno can't survive the bombardment for long,
so the craft sets itself on a unique orbit
around the gas giant.
It actually has a very long orbit
where it spends most of its time far away,
and then every once in a while dives in and goes,
"oh, hot, hot, hot, hot. I zoomed in too much,"
and then goes safely away to communicate and process
and then back in again.
Juno takes a mighty gamble
diving deep into these radiation belts
to achieve one of its key objectives...
mapping Jupiter's giant magnetic field,
and as Juno swoops around the planet,
it reveals something scientists have never seen before.
When you look at the Earth,
we have a fairly simple magnetic field.
It's like a giant bar magnet with a north
and south magnetic pole.
Well, Jupiter has that as well.
This is called a dipolar field.
It's got two poles, but it also has a third pole.
Juno's magnetic field maps
show a north and south pole
and a bizarre magnetic disturbance at the equator.
And it's like Jupiter just sprouted a third arm,
and that's kind of mysterious.
On magnetic field maps,
north poles show up red and south poles blue,
so scientists are calling this second south pole
the great blue spot.
Everyone knows about the Great Red Spot,
but Jupiter now has a great blue spot as well.
This magnetic disturbance reflects
Jupiter's stormy interior.
You have these fast-moving winds blowing on the magnetic field,
and they're actually shearing it apart
and moving the field around.
It's not necessarily a storm,
although it could be.
It maybe is better to think of it as a magnetic storm.
Turbulence inside Jupiter could be
twisting up the magnetic field to drive the great blue spot
and the deadly radiation belts that Juno must navigate through.
Unlike earth, Jupiter is not really a solid mass
for the most part, so all of its clouds and gases
are moving at slightly different rates,
and that actually makes the magnetic field
that's generated very variable and highly changing.
For us to have a variable magnetic field
like Jupiter does,
the entire earth would have to be molten.
We really don't want that to happen.
With each orbit, Juno unravels more mysteries
of this giant planet, but Jupiter's deepest secret
could shine a light on our own origins.
If we want to understand the Earth
and our place in the solar system,
Juno has found that a lot of those mysteries
are locked up there in Jupiter.
The Juno spacecraft
is uncovering the secrets of Jupiter
from its swirling cloud tops to its dark heart,
but Juno's discoveries go beyond the gas giant itself.
They could also solve mysteries surrounding our own planet.
Jupiter is the key
to the formation of the solar system,
which means it's the key to understanding
how the Earth formed.
Juno is actually giving us a view
into the history of our planetary system,
even the history of earth.
4.6 billion years ago,
a cloud of hydrogen gas and cosmic dust collapses,
sparking nuclear fusion.
From the resulting chaos,
one star, four rocky worlds,
and four gassy giants are born
and form our solar system.
There's these distinct zones of the solar system...
rocky and metallic in the inner part,
gaseous and water-rich in the outer part,
and even without thinking about that too hard,
it kind of makes sense because in close to the Sun,
it's warmer.
Out farther away from the Sun, it's cooler.
But the Earth breaks the mold.
Our planet has far more water than theories predict.
The Earth formed in a part of the solar system that,
well, you'd think normally should be probably pretty dry
because it was pretty close to the Sun.
Our planet is just 150 million miles from the Sun,
putting us inside what scientists call the snow line.
Inside this line, the Sun is powerful enough
to evaporate water during a planet's formation.
Inside the snow line, the temperatures are high,
and there's a lot of energy from the Sun nearby.
Too close to the Sun,
those gaseous and ice-rich materials just can't exist.
They're evaporate away by the heat of the Sun.
Our watery world should be a dry rock in space.
Understanding how water got to the Earth is so important
because it wouldn't be there in the very, very beginning.
But Jupiter could hold the answer to this mystery.
To solve the riddle of earth's water,
Juno aims to discover where our Jupiter was born.
Understanding how and where
and when Jupiter formed is critical
because it has really dominated
the entire evolution of the solar system.
It's the biggest planet by far.
It's the biggest thing out there that's moving everything around.
Any water in the early solar system
could've been moved around by Jupiter's mighty gravity,
so if Juno can trace the history of this giant planet,
that could explain why we find H2O where it's least expected.
We know that planets can move closer to the Sun
and farther out while they're forming
and even after they form,
so how do we figure out where Jupiter formed?
The key is how much water is
locked up inside Jupiter.
If 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.
If Juno can measure the water content of Jupiter,
it will solve a 20-year-old mystery.
December 1995...
NASA's Galileo probe begins a fatal dive
into Jupiter's atmosphere.
When it did, it was able to measure the atmosphere around it
and detect water, and the thing is... it didn't.
It didn't find any, and that's weird.
Everything was bone-dry, so why in the world
did Jupiter's atmosphere look dry?
If the results from the Galileo probe are correct,
then 4.6 billion years ago,
Jupiter formed closer to the Sun,
but that's not the whole story.
20 years later, NASA sends Juno to get a second opinion.
Juno 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.
Juno doesn't have to risk
its life to hunt for water.
The craft peers through Jupiter's thick clouds
using a microwave radiometer to detect H2O from a safe distance.
Using these microwaves,
Juno builds up a global map of Jupiter's water.
What Juno has found is, yeah,
there's plenty of water in Jupiter,
it's just that Galileo happened to hit a dry spot,
but in fact, if it had come in almost anywhere else,
it would've seen plenty of water.
Juno's findings may give a clue
to where Jupiter originally formed.
It seems apparent now that Jupiter
didn't form in its present location.
The 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.
But we find Jupiter is twice as far away from the Sun
as where that original snow line would've been,
so this is telling us something interesting.
Jupiter may have wandered from
its original position,
causing unimaginable chaos.
As Jupiter moved around, things got hit
and knocked out of the solar system.
It essentially scatters everything in its path.
It's the biggest player. It's the biggest planet.
Everything moves for it.
As Jupiter bulldozes toward the outer solar system,
it slings ice-rich asteroids
and comets in towards the Sun and towards the Earth.
Jupiter would literally in some sense
have snowplowed into the inner solar system
a whole wave of water-rich planetesimals
that would've delivered much of our Earth's oceans.
Juno has helped answer why our Earth is habitable
despite being so close to the Sun.
So it was worth going all that distance,
sending Juno all the way out there to get that closer look.
Juno continues to explore
Jupiter's mysteries and its famous features.
There is nothing more iconic about Jupiter
than the Great Red Spot.
And Juno reveals that this 300-year-old cyclone
may soon vanish.
Our solar system plays host
to some epic natural wonders...
the ice geysers of Enceladus,
the giant rings of Saturn,
the martian mega volcano Olympus Mons,
but in July of 2017,
NASA's Juno probe skims the surface of Jupiter
and photographs the most famous natural wonder...
a fierce, hurricane-like storm
that's been raging for hundreds of years.
When you think of Jupiter,
one of the most visually stunning
and most iconic features of the atmosphere
is that Great Red Spot.
There is nothing like Jupiter's red spot
in our entire solar system.
As Juno soars over the Great Red Spot,
it looks down onto a storm over 10,000 miles across.
This is the most extreme storm.
The winds are blowing continuously
at 400 miles an hour.
On earth, the most powerful category 5 hurricanes
can unleash almost total destruction,
but these are less than half as powerful
as the storm on Jupiter.
The Great Red Spot is the greatest hurricane
that you've ever imagined.
But that's not all.
Juno's microwave radiometer allows scientists to see through
Jupiter's cloud layers for the first time.
Juno has instrumentation that's able to look underneath,
so one of the things we did was we looked
at how deep are the roots.
Juno peers down into the eye
of this monstrous storm.
It spots temperature changes far below the surface
that follow the storm's iconic shape,
tracing the roots of the Great Red Spot
deep into the Jovian atmosphere.
They found out that it goes down over
200 miles deep into the atmosphere.
There's nothing like that on Earth.
The greatest cyclones of our own planet
can reach heights of around 10 miles,
but Jupiter's Great Red Spot is over 20 times taller.
I think that really brings into perspective
the massive scale of this planet.
Jupiter's vast, turbulent atmosphere
hosts the deepest storm mankind has ever seen,
and Juno's discoveries get scientists wondering.
Could the Great Red Spot help explain
another of Jupiter's mysteries,
the planet's surprisingly warm atmosphere?
Jupiter looks out in our outer solar system
where everything is very cold.
The Sun is very dim when you get that far away.
Jupiter is five times farther from the Sun than we are,
so it's only getting 4%
of the amount of energy from the Sun that we do.
But there's something heating up
the atmosphere of Jupiter.
There are parts of it that are many times warmer
than we could explain with sunlight.
The question is, of course, where is that energy
coming from?
Juno swoops in for another pass on Jupiter,
turning its high-resolution cameras
on the raging storm below.
The storm unleashes vicious turbulence
into the surrounding atmosphere,
giving scientists the clue they need
to explain the planet's high temperature.
The Great Red Spot is a giant hurricane
that's powered by heat deep in the core of Jupiter,
but it has such violent and chaotic motion,
it's mixing up the atmosphere around it.
The thunderstorms on Jupiter are gonna be generating
booming thunder just the same way
that they do here on the Earth.
Thunderclouds send sound waves
rippling through the storm.
A sound wave is a wave of pressure,
of compression where air molecules
or water molecules get compacted.
They get squeezed together,
and when you squeeze something together,
they're a lot closer together
and they're gonna get pretty hot.
These sounds waves shoot up
500 miles above the storm
where they break, converting sound energy into heat.
These sound waves, they crash together,
creating a tremendous amount of energy
and heating the gases around them.
Jupiter's great red spot has helped heat
the Jovian atmosphere for hundreds of years,
but new images suggest that this may be about to change.
Jupiter's red spot is so big,
I mean, it's bigger than earth by a long shot.
It seems like it would be an incredibly stable thing.
It's just there and it's always been there and always will be.
Recently, we've seen it changing.
When NASA's Voyager space probe visited
Jupiter in 1979,
it observed a storm twice the diameter of Earth.
In 2017, Juno's images show the Great Red Spot
has lost a third of its width, but that's not all.
Despite the storm shrinking, it's actually getting taller.
The Great Red Spot is being stretched and forced
into Jupiter's upper atmosphere.
The storms in the Great Red Spot,
it's kind of like the clay on a potter's wheel,
where as you bring your hands closer together
to draw the clay in, the closer your hands are,
the taller the pottery becomes, and similarly, for the storm,
as it becomes smaller at the base,
it raises taller toward the upper atmosphere.
It's getting taller, and we see storms
do the same thing on earth, and when it does that,
the wind shear will actually take the top of the storm off
and drag it apart, and so we'll be watching it
very intently over the next few years
to see if that's what happens on Jupiter as well.
It may be only a matter of time
before Jupiter's high-altitude winds
tear this iconic storm to shreds.
The most famous storm of the solar system
may soon disappear,
but Juno reveals other storms
hidden in the strangest of places.
The storm in the Great Red Spot is one,
but not the only, giant storm that's happening on Jupiter.
NASA's Juno probe has traveled billions of miles
across the solar system
to reveal the mysteries of gas giant Jupiter,
but there's one part of Jupiter
that has remained hidden until now.
Before Juno, our view of Jupiter was very limited.
We'd never actually flown over the poles.
It's something that's very hard to do on Jupiter.
We don't have other missions that have done this.
In August of 2016, Juno's flight plan takes
the spacecraft into unknown territory to reveal
Jupiter's mysterious polar regions for the first time.
Well, and the first time we looked at the pole,
it didn't look anything like the Jupiter we knew.
We never would've guessed that was Jupiter
if somebody had shown that to us.
Juno's camera reveals a strange blue expanse
that puzzles scientists.
The electronic color
could be due to chemical changes in the clouds
brought on by a lack of sunlight,
but what Juno spots inside the blue clouds
is even stranger...
giant central cyclones spin around each pole at 200 miles
an hour, with these cyclones
surrounded by eight stormy vortices in the north
and five in the south.
There are these weird cyclones, gigantic swirls,
vortices of gas swirling around Jupiter's poles,
and they're clearly forming patterns.
It's hard to get a sense of scale here.
Now the north polar central cyclone,
that one right at the pole, that's 2,500 miles across.
That is almost as big as the continental United States.
What is going on there?
This is nothing like what we see on earth.
On earth, our weather is driven by heat from the Sun
that hits our planet at the equator
and flows across the surface.
Powerful cyclones form over tropical waters
and move around the planet,
but the polar regions receive less energy from the Sun,
so cyclones can't form at the poles.
We see that if you're at the equator,
it's warmer and it's stormier.
If you're at the poles,
where the Sun is slightly harder to see, that activity goes away.
But the weather on Jupiter
couldn't be more different.
We see lightning and convective thunderstorms
at the poles of Jupiter but not at the equator,
and that's sort of the opposite of what we see on the Earth.
The question is, what's driving Jupiter's storms?
Jupiter is five times further
away from the Sun than the Earth
and receives only a fraction of the Sun's energy.
Unlike earth, Jupiter's polar regions
seem to be where the action is.
Something is driving the planet's weird weather,
and Juno's scans of the giant planet's thermal emissions
suggests it could be Jupiter itself.
We can actually see the internal heat of Jupiter
coming right up through,
and so Jupiter will look very bright in areas
where we can see that heat.
Juno detects searing heat
beneath Jupiter's cloud bands.
Jupiter has so much material, so much mass,
so much gravity that the interior is incredibly dense
and very, very hot.
At the core, it's probably at many thousands of degrees hotter
than the surface of the Sun.
This fiery inferno buried in Jupiter's dark heart
is a relic from its birth billions of years ago.
The violent collisions that formed the planet
left its core seething hot,
a heat that remains to this day,
buried under thousands of miles of insulating gas.
As the heat slowly leaks outward,
Jupiter's fast-rotating atmosphere
creates vicious cyclones and thunderstorms.
And that's what's really driving most of the weather.
It's not the Sun. It's Jupiter itself.
And as Juno soars over the planet,
it reveals another weather mystery.
The craft detects bursts of radio waves
spiking up to four times a second...
the telltale sign of ferocious lightning strikes.
Clouds are moving around in the atmosphere
and building up electric charge
and causing bolts of lightning to form,
and we've actually seen this with the Juno spacecraft.
These are mega storms orders of magnitude bigger
than here on Earth.
And Juno finds there's more to these thunderclouds
than just flashes of light...
giant icy hailstones of water and ammonia,
the chemical which gives Jupiter's clouds
their orange color.
High up in Jupiter's atmosphere,
the ammonia is mixing with the water,
and it becomes a liquid ball
that starts to collect ice around it,
and it will fall like hail does deep into Jupiter's atmosphere.
On earth, hail falls to the ground and melts,
but on Jupiter, there is no ground.
And it gets lifted in the atmosphere
because of an updraft and then more ice,
and it builds bigger, and then it falls down,
and then it gets carried back up,
and so hail is often many layers being built.
These ice balls grow layer by layer as they soar up
and down the atmosphere.
If they formed in storms here on earth,
they'd cause some serious damage.
So if you were buzzing around Jupiter
and you were near where these storms were,
you might get hit by hail coming up or going down.
This is one of the most violent, energetic atmospheres
in the entire solar system.
Juno is revealing the secrets
that Jupiter has hidden for decades,
including the mystery of Jupiter's northern lights.
When Juno studied the lights
coming from the aurora on Jupiter,
it found that something really weird is going on.
On earth, dazzling auroras light up the skies
as charged particles from the Sun
interact with atoms high in the atmosphere.
Deep in the outer solar system, Jupiter is too far from the Sun
for strong auroras to form in this way,
but high above the giant planet's poles,
Juno spots a seemingly impossible light show.
The auroras of Jupiter are tremendously larger
than the ones that we find here on Earth.
In fact, the auroral rings near the poles
are bigger than our planet itself.
Jupiter's auroras emit
primarily ultraviolet and X-ray light,
so you can't see it with the naked human eye,
but if you could see them and you were at Jupiter,
that would be an amazing light show
because those auroras are strong.
These glowing displays are
evidence of charged particles
slamming into Jupiter's atmosphere.
But if they're not coming from the Sun,
where are they coming from?
Hunting for an answer, Juno snaps an image
of Jupiter's southern lights
with its ultraviolet imaging spectrometer.
Inside the aurora, it glimpses something strange.
When Juno studied the lights
coming from the aurora on Jupiter,
it found that they were even stronger than expected,
and in fact, when you look at
Jupiter's poles in wavelengths that our eyes can't see,
for example, ultraviolet, you see a hot spot.
This hot spot marks the point
where huge concentrations of charged particles
strike Jupiter's atmosphere.
Tracing their trajectory reveals the culprit
of Jupiter's dazzling light shows...
the volcanoes of Jupiter's moons.
Jupiter's moon, Io has hundreds of active volcanoes
spewing out materials way out into space,
and many of those get trapped by the magnetic field of Jupiter.
Io's volcanoes fire out jets of charged particles,
which are swept by the giant planet's magnetic field.
It's funneling those particles down
and slamming into specific spots in Jupiter's atmosphere.
But Io isn't the only moon responsible
for Jupiter's polar light show.
If we go further out, Europa, Ganymede,
Callisto, those are more icy.
They don't necessarily have volcanoes.
These icy moons twist up
Jupiter's magnetic field in their own way.
Some of these moons have magnetic fields that interact
with Jupiter's magnetic field,
and that actually intensifies the aurora display on Jupiter.
Jupiter's moons work together
to energize the greatest auroras in the solar system,
but in these beautiful displays
is a stark reminder of the danger Juno faces.
When you look at these pictures of the aurora on Jupiter,
and you think, oh, that's beautiful.
Wouldn't it be great to see that in person?
The answer is no, no, it wouldn't
because they will kill you.
What's causing these displays are subatomic particles
accelerated to tremendously high speeds
by the magnetic fields involved.
The radiation around Jupiter is lethal
and not just for humans.
The lifetime of the Juno mission is very limited
by the extreme conditions it has to survive in.
We think that in the future,
a lot of the instruments will be so irradiated,
they won't really work anymore.
When Juno's titanium armor finally fails,
Jupiter's deadly radiation will damage the craft beyond repair,
so the team plan to go out with a bang,
thrusting Juno into Jupiter's atmosphere,
where the craft will be torn to pieces.
Eventually, it'll be drawn down into Jupiter's depths
and become a part of the planet itself.
But before then,
Juno has many more mysteries to unlock.
We'll answer some questions, and we'll raise some more.
That's what I expect
and we'll get some fantastic images.
Every single thing has turned out to be a surprise.
There are so many things that Juno has opened our eyes to that
I can't imagine having not sent it.
So we're in for at least a year
more of the most profound surprises about Jupiter.
What we're learning, what we're unlocking,
not just about Jupiter,
but the formation of the solar system
and potential formation of life itself
here on earth,
it's mind-blowing.