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Juno's SRU Captures Jupiter Lightning

Dec 19, 2018
This image shows Jupiter's northern auroral oval as captured by NASA's Juno spacecraft on May 24, 2018 (Perijove 13).

Juno's Radiation Monitoring Investigation used the Stellar Reference Unit (SRU) star camera to collect this high-resolution image Jupiter's northern auroral oval on May 24, 2018 (Perijove 13). Also present in the image are several small bright dots and streaks -- signatures of high energy relativistic electrons from polar beams that are penetrating the camera. The large bright dot in the lower right corner of the image is a flash of Jupiter's lightning. Juno was less than 37,000 miles (60,000 km) from the cloud tops when this SRU image was collected -- the closest view of Jupiter's aurora with a visible light imager.

JunoCam's raw images are available at www.missionjuno.swri.edu/junocam for the public to peruse and process into image products.

More information about Juno is online at http://www.nasa.gov/juno and http://missionjuno.swri.edu.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory manages the Juno mission for the principal investigator, Scott Bolton, of Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. Juno is part of NASA's New Frontiers Program, which is managed at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, for NASA's Science Mission Directorate. Lockheed Martin Space Systems, Denver, built the spacecraft. Caltech in Pasadena, California, manages JPL for NASA.

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