JPL News - Day in Review

 

DAY IN REVIEW Twin Spacecraft to Weigh in on Earth's Changing Water A pair of new spacecraft that will observe our planet's ever-changing water cycle, ice sheets and crust is in final preparations for a California launch no earlier than Saturday, May 19. The Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment Follow-On (GRACE-FO) mission, a partnership between NASA and the German Research Centre for Geosciences (GFZ), will take over where the first GRACE mission left off when it completed its 15-year mission in 2017. GRACE-FO will continue monitoring monthly changes in the distribution of mass within and among Earth's atmosphere, oceans, land and ice sheets, as well as within the solid Earth itself. These data will provide unique insights into Earth's changing climate, Earth system processes and even the impacts of some human activities, and will have far-reaching benefits to society, such as improving water resource management. "Water is critical to every aspect of life on Earth -- for health, for agriculture, for maintaining our way of living," said Michael Watkins, GRACE-FO science lead and director of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. "You can't manage it well until you can measure it. GRACE-FO provides a unique way to measure water in many of its phases, allowing us to manage water resources more effectively." Like GRACE, GRACE-FO will use an innovative technique to observe something that can't be seen directly from space. It uses the weight of water to measure its movement -- even water hidden far below Earth's surface. GRACE-FO will do this by very precisely measuring the changes in the shape of Earth's gravity field caused by the movement of massive amounts of water, ice and solid Earth. "When water is underground, it's impossible to directly observe from space. There's no picture you can take or radar you can bounce off the surface to measure changes in that deep water," said Watkins. "But it has mass, and GRACE-FO is almost the only way we have of observing it on large scales. Similarly, tracking changes in the total mass of the polar ice sheets is also very difficult, but GRACE-FO essentially puts a 'scale' under them to track their changes over time." A Legacy of Discoveries GRACE-FO will extend the GRACE data record an additional five years and expand its legacy of scientific achievements. GRACE chronicled the ongoing loss of mass from the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets and mountain glaciers. That wealth of data shed light on the key processes, short-term variability and long-term trends that impact sea level rise, helping to improve sea level projections. The estimates of total water storage on land derived from GRACE data, from groundwater changes in deep aquifers to changes in soil moisture and surface water, are giving water managers new tools to measure the impact of droughts and monitor and forecast floods. GRACE data also have been used to infer changes in deep ocean currents, a driving force in Earth's climate. Its atmospheric temperature profile data, derived from measurements of how signals from the constellation of GPS satellites were bent as they traveled through the atmosphere and received by antennas on the GRACE satellites, have contributed to U.S. and European weather forecast products. GRACE data have even been used to measure changes within the solid Earth itself, including the response of Earth's crust to the retreat of glaciers since the last Ice Age, and the impact of large earthquakes. According to Frank Webb, GRACE-FO project scientist at JPL, the new mission will provide invaluable observations of long-term climate-related mass changes. "The only way to know for sure whether observed multi-year trends represent long-term changes in mass balance is to extend the length of the observations," Webb said. An Orbiting Cat and Mouse Like its predecessors, the two identical GRACE-FO satellites will function as a single instrument. The satellites orbit Earth about 137 miles (220 kilometers) apart, at an initial altitude of about 305 miles (490 kilometers). Each satellite continually sends microwave signals to the other to accurately measure changes in the distance between them. As they fly over a massive Earth feature, such as a mountain range or underground aquifer, the gravitational pull of that feature tugs on the satellites, changing the distance separating them. By tracking changes in their separation distance with incredible accuracy -- to less than the thickness of a human hair -- the satellites are able to map these regional gravity changes. A GPS receiver is used to track each spacecraft's position relative to Earth's surface, and onboard accelerometers record non-gravitational forces on the spacecraft, such as atmospheric drag and solar radiation. These data are combined to produce monthly maps of the regional changes in global gravity and corresponding near-surface mass variations, which primarily reflect changes in the distribution of water mass in Earth's atmosphere, oceans, land and ice sheets. In addition, GRACE-FO will test an experimental Laser Ranging Interferometer, an instrument that could increase the precision of measurements between the two spacecraft by a factor of 10 or more, for future missions similar to GRACE. The interferometer, developed by a German/American instrument team, will be the first in-space demonstration of laser interferometry between satellites. "The Laser Ranging Interferometer is an excellent example of a great partnership," said Frank Flechtner, GFZ's GRACE-FO project manager. "I'm looking forward to analyzing these innovative inter-satellite ranging data and their impact on gravity field modeling." GRACE-FO will be launched into orbit with five Iridium NEXT communications satellites on a commercially procured SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. This unique "rideshare" launch will first deploy GRACE-FO, then the Falcon 9 second stage will continue to a higher orbit to deploy the Iridium satellites. GRACE-FO continues a successful partnership between NASA and Germany's GFZ, with participation by the German Aerospace Center (DLR). JPL manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. For more information on GRACE-FO, visit: https://www.nasa.gov/gracefo   A media reel is available at: https://vimeo.com/266146377

 

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JPL News - Day in Review

 

DAY IN REVIEW Before the Flood Arrives New NASA Study May Improve Future River-Observing Satellites River floods are one of the most common and devastating of Earth's natural disasters. In the past decade, deluges from rivers have killed thousands of people every year around the world and caused losses on the order of tens of billions of U.S. dollars annually. Climate change, which is projected to increase precipitation in certain areas of the planet, might make river floods in these places more frequent and severe in the coming decades. Now, a new study led by researchers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, analyzes what it would take for river-observing satellitesto become an even more useful tool to mitigate flood damage and improve reservoir management globally in near real-time. "Early flood warning systems traditionally depend on gauge networks that detect floods farther up the river, but gauge data are becoming more and more scarce," said George Allen, lead author of the new research and a hydrologist at JPL. "Our study shows that there's room for satellites to help fill in the gap. But for satellites to inform real-time flood mitigation, they have to provide data to water managers within a sufficiently short lag time." River floods occur when a channel fills with water beyond the capacity of its banks, normally due to heavy rainfall. The flood travels along the course of the river as a wave, moving downstream faster than the water itself. Several satellite missions have been able to detect floods as sudden changes in the height or width of river waters. Once a flood is observed, it is relatively easy to predict accurately how it will move down the river. This information is extremely useful in early flood warning systems and other real-time river management applications. To study the speed at which floods propagate through the planet's rivers, Allen and his colleagues ran a simple numerical model of flow waves that used information such as the width, slope, depth and roughness -- the amount of friction water experiences when traveling along a river -- of rivers worldwide. After analyzing wave speeds through 11 million miles (17.7 million kilometers) of rivers around the planet, the researchers found that flood waves traveling at their maximum speed take a median time of three days to reach the next downstream dam, four days to arrive to the next downstream city and six days to exit the river system entirely. The team compared their model's results with discharge records from more than 20,000 U.S. Geological Survey gauge stations along around 40,000 miles (64,400 kilometers) of varied river systems in the United States. They found that the model estimated faster wave speeds than the gauge data showed. "That was expected, based on the fact that we're modeling waves moving at maximum speeds, whereas the gauge data are looking at all types of wave speeds: low speeds, high speeds, everything in between," Allen said. "In this way, our study estimates a worst-case-scenario of how fast floods can move down rivers." The scientists then used their wave speed findings to calculate data latency -- how quickly satellite data should be downloaded, processed and made available to the public to be useful for flood early warning systems and other real-time flood mitigation strategies, as well as reservoir management. In particular, they focused on future data from NASA's upcoming Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) mission. SWOT, scheduled to launch in 2021, is specifically designed to observe rivers. That's because it has a repeat orbit of 21 days and will be able to detect flood waves, particularly in higher-latitude large rivers. The researchers found that making SWOT data available within days after being acquired by the spacecraft could be useful for real-time flood mitigation. Compared to past or current satellites providing river and flood information, SWOT will provide never-before-seen maps of river height, allowing for more reliable prediction of flood timing and magnitude. If the data were to be processed in two days or less, Allen's team calculated, it would be ready for emergency managers before at least two-thirds of observed waves reached the next downstream city. For dams, the quick turnaround of satellite measurements would give advance notice to downstream reservoirs in at least half of the cases when SWOT detects a flood wave. "There is a trade-off between data latency and data quality," said Cédric David of JPL, who directed the new study and is a member of SWOT's science team. "So, do we want to wait to get the best data possible, or do we want to get a rough version of what's going on now, so we can provide actionable information? As we prepare for new satellite missions like SWOT, that's when we start asking these types of questions." Satellite data that could inform flood early warning systems would be particularly useful for developing nations, where either there are insufficient river gauges or countries do not share gauge data with their downstream neighbors, Allen said. Results of the study are published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. For more information on SWOT, visit: https://swot.jpl.nasa.gov/

 

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JPL News - Day in Review

 

DAY IN REVIEW Stellar Dust Survey Paves Way for Exoplanet Missions The Hunt for Observable Signatures of Terrestrial Systems, or HOSTS, survey was tasked with learning more about the effect of solar system dust on the search for new worlds. › Read the full story NASA to Hold Briefing on Next Earth-Observing Mission NASA will host a media briefing April 30 on the upcoming launch of twin satellites to track how changes in Earth's mass distribution affect climate, water resources and more. › Read the full story

 

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Teachable Moment: NASA InSight Lander to Get First Look at 'Heart' of Mars A spacecraft designed to study seismic activity on Mars, or "marsquakes," is scheduled to lift off on a nearly seven-month journey to the Red Planet on May 5, 2018. NASA's InSight Mars lander is designed to get the first in-depth look at the "heart" of Mars: its crust, mantle and core. In other words, it will be the Red Planet's first thorough checkup since it formed 4.5 billion years ago. The launch, from Vandenberg Air Force Base in Central California, also marks a first: It will be the first time a spacecraft bound for another planet lifts off from the West Coast. It's a great opportunity to get students excited about the science and math used to launch rockets and explore other planets. In the latest Teachable Moment from NASA/JPL Edu, education specialist Ota Lutz explains how the InSight mission will reveal Mars' inner workings and provide a window into how other rocky planets formed – including Earth! Teachers and parents can also find a collection of lessons and activities to get students exploring Mars like NASA scientists and engineers. Read the Blog   Related Lessons and Resources for Educators Use these standards-aligned lessons and activities to get your students engaged in Mars missions and science. Let's Go to Mars: Calculating Launch Windows (Grades 9-12) - Students use advanced algebra concepts to determine the next opportunity to launch a spacecraft to Mars. Get started Quake Quandary: A 'Pi in the Sky' Math Challenge (Grades 11-12) - In this illustrated math problem, students use the mathematical constant pi to identify the timing and location of a seismic event on Mars, called a "marsquake." Get started Mission to Mars Unit (Grades 3-8) - In this 19-lesson unit, students learn about Mars, design a mission to explore the planet, build and test model spacecraft and components, and engage in scientific exploration. Get started Stomp Rockets (Grades 4-9) - In this video lesson, students learn to design, build and launch paper rockets, calculate how high they fly and improve their designs. Read more

 

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JPL News - Day in Review

 

DAY IN REVIEW What Uranus Cloud Tops Have in Common With Rotten Eggs Even after decades of observations and a visit by NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft, Uranus held on to one critical secret -- the composition of its clouds. Now, one of the key components of the planet's clouds has finally been verified. A global research team that includes Glenn Orton of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, has spectroscopically dissected the infrared light from Uranus captured by the 26.25-foot (8-meter) Gemini North telescope on Hawaii's Mauna Kea. They found hydrogen sulfide, the odiferous gas that most people avoid, in Uranus' cloud tops. The long-sought evidence was published in the April 23rd issue of the journal Nature Astronomy. The detection of hydrogen sulfide high in Uranus' cloud deck (and presumably Neptune's) is a striking difference from the gas giant planets located closer to the Sun -- Jupiter and Saturn -- where ammonia is observed above the clouds, but no hydrogen sulfide. These differences in atmospheric composition shed light on questions about the planets' formation and history. "We've strongly suspected that hydrogen sulfide gas was influencing the millimeter and radio spectrum of Uranus for some time, but we were unable to attribute the absorption needed to identify it positively. Now, that part of the puzzle is falling into place as well," Orton said. The Gemini data, obtained with the Near-Infrared Integral Field Spectrometer (NIFS), sampled reflected sunlight from a region immediately above the main visible cloud layer in Uranus' atmosphere. "While the lines we were trying to detect were just barely there, we were able to detect them unambiguously thanks to the sensitivity of NIFS on Gemini, combined with the exquisite conditions on Mauna Kea," said lead author Patrick Irwin of the University of Oxford, U.K. No worries, though, that the odor of hydrogen sulfide would overtake human senses. According to Irwin, "Suffocation and exposure in the negative 200 degrees Celsius [392 degrees Fahrenheit] atmosphere made of mostly hydrogen, helium and methane would take its toll long before the smell." Read more on the news of Uranus' atmosphere from Gemini Observatory here. Caltech in Pasadena, California, manages JPL for NASA.

 

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JPL News - Day in Review

 

DAY IN REVIEW Four Years of NASA NEOWISE Data NASA's Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (NEOWISE) mission has released its fourth year of survey data. Since the mission was restarted in December 2013, after a period of hibernation, the asteroid- and comet-hunter has completely scanned the skies nearly eight times and has observed and characterized 29,375 objects in four years of operations. This total includes 788 near-Earth objects and 136 comets since the mission restart. Near-Earth objects (NEOs) are comets and asteroids that have been nudged by the gravitational attraction of the planets in our solar system into orbits that allow them to enter Earth's neighborhood. Ten of the objects discovered by NEOWISE in the past year have been classified as potentially hazardous asteroids (PHAs). Near-Earth objects are classified as PHAs, based on their size and how closely they can approach Earth's orbit. "NEOWISE continues to expand our catalog and knowledge of these elusive and important objects," said Amy Mainzer, NEOWISE principal investigator from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. "In total, NEOWISE has now characterized sizes and reflectivities of over 1,300 near-Earth objects since the spacecraft was launched, offering an invaluable resource for understanding the physical properties of this population, and studying what they are made of and where they have come from." The NEOWISE team has released an animation depicting detections made by the telescope over its four years of surveying the solar system. More than 2.5 million infrared images of the sky were collected in the fourth year of operations by NEOWISE. These data are combined with the year one through three NEOWISE data into a single publicly available archive. That archive contains approximately 10.3 million sets of images and a database of more than 76 billion source detections extracted from those images. Originally called the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE), the spacecraft launched in December 2009. It was placed in hibernation in 2011 after its primary astrophysics mission was completed. In September 2013, it was reactivated, renamed NEOWISE and assigned a new mission: to assist NASA's efforts to identify and characterize the population of near-Earth objects. NEOWISE also is characterizing more distant populations of asteroids and comets to provide information about their sizes and compositions. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, manages and operates the NEOWISE mission for NASA's Planetary Defense Coordination Office within the Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The Space Dynamics Laboratory in Logan, Utah, built the science instrument. Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. of Boulder, Colorado, built the spacecraft. Science data processing takes place at the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center at Caltech in Pasadena. Caltech manages JPL for NASA. To review the latest data release from NEOWISE, please visit: http://wise2.ipac.caltech.edu/docs/release/neowise/ For more information about NEOWISE, visit: https://www.nasa.gov/neowise http://neowise.ipac.caltech.edu/ More information about asteroids and near-Earth objects is at: https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/asteroidwatch To learn more about NASA's efforts for Planetary Defense see: https://www.nasa.gov/planetarydefense/overview

 

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JPL News - Day in Review

 

LATEST NEWS NASA Engineers Dream Big with Small Spacecraft Many of NASA's most iconic spacecraft towered over the engineers who built them: think Voyagers 1 and 2, Cassini or Galileo -- all large machines that could measure up to a school bus. But in the past two decades, mini-satellites called CubeSats have made space accessible to a new generation. These briefcase-sized boxes are more focused in their abilities and have a fraction of the mass -- and cost -- of some past titans of space. In May, engineers will be watching closely as NASA launches its first pair of CubeSats designed for deep space. The twin spacecraft are called Mars Cube One, or MarCO, and were built at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. Both MarCO spacecraft will be hitching a ride on the same rocket launching InSight, NASA's next robotic lander headed for Mars. The MarCOs are intended to follow InSight on its cruise through space; if they survive the journey, each is equipped with a folding high-gain antenna to relay data about InSight as it enters the Martian atmosphere and lands. The MarCOs won't produce any science of their own, and aren't required for InSight to send its data back home (the lander will rely on NASA's Mars orbiters for that, in addition to communicating directly with antennas on Earth). But the twins will be a crucial first test of CubeSat technology beyond Earth orbit, demonstrating how they could be used to further explore the solar system. "These are our scouts," said Andy Klesh of JPL, MarCO's chief engineer. "CubeSats haven't had to survive the intense radiation of a trip to deep space before, or use propulsion to point their way towards Mars. We hope to blaze that trail." The official names of these two scouts are "MarCO-A" and "MarCO-B." But to the team that built them, they're "Wall-E" and "Eva" -- nicknames based on Pixar characters. Both MarCOs use a compressed gas commonly found in fire extinguishers to push themselves through space, the same way Wall-E did in his 2008 film. Survival is far from guaranteed. As the saying goes: space is hard. The first challenge will be switching on. The MarCO batteries were last checked in March by Tyvak Nano-Satellite Systems of Irvine, California, which inserted each CubeSat into a special dispenser that will propel it into space. Those batteries will be used to deploy each CubeSat's solar arrays, with the hope that enough power will be left over to turn on their radios. If power is too low, the MarCO team may hear silence until each spacecraft is more fully charged. If both MarCOs make the journey, they'll test a method of communications relay that could act as a "black box" for future Mars landings, helping engineers understand the difficult process of getting spacecraft to safely touch down on the Red Planet. Mars landings are notoriously hard to stick. The MarCOs could also prove that CubeSats are ready to go beyond Earth. CubeSats were first developed to teach university students about satellites. Today, they're a major commercial technology, providing data on everything from shipping routes to environmental changes. NASA scientists are eager to explore the solar system using CubeSats. JPL even has its own CubeSat clean room, where several flight projects have been built, including the MarCOs. For young engineers, the thrill is building something that could potentially reach Mars in just a matter of years rather than a decade. "We're a small team, so everyone gets experience working on multiple parts of the spacecraft," Klesh said. "You learn everything about building, testing and flying along the way. We're inventing every day at this point." The MarCOs were built by JPL, which manages InSight and MarCO for NASA. They were funded by both JPL and NASA's Science Mission Directorate. A number of commercial suppliers provided unique technologies for the MarCOs. A full list, along with more information about the spacecraft, can be found here.

 

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JPL News - Day in Review

 

DAY IN REVIEW NASA's New Space 'Botanist' Arrives at Launch Site A new space-based instrument to measure how plants respond to changes in water availability has arrived at NASA's Kennedy Space Center for final launch preparations › Read the full story NASA Nominated for Six Webby Awards NASA digital communications have been recognized with nominations for six Webby Awards, the highest honor for online communications. Public voting is open through April 19. › Read the full story NASA Marks Earth Day with #NASA4Earth Tools, Events This Earth Day, NASA invites you to create shareable views of our home planet, combat mosquito-transmitted diseases and fly along with our fleet of Earth-observing spacecraft. › Read the full story

 

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JPL News - Day in Review

 

DAY IN REVIEW Astrophysics CubeSat Demonstrates Big Potential in a Small Package The ASTERIA satellite, which was deployed into low-Earth orbit in November, is only slightly larger than a box of cereal, but it could be used to help astrophysicists study planets orbiting other stars. Mission managers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, recently announced that ASTERIA has accomplished all of its primary mission objectives, demonstrating that the miniaturized technologies on board can operate in space as expected. This marks the success of one of the world's first astrophysics CubeSat missions, and shows that small, low-cost satellites could be used to assist in future studies of the universe beyond the solar system. "ASTERIA is small but mighty," said Mission Manager Matthew W. Smith of JPL. "Packing the capabilities of a much larger spacecraft into a small footprint was a challenge, but in the end we demonstrated cutting-edge performance for a system this size." Seeing Stars ASTERIA, or the Arcsecond Space Telescope Enabling Research in Astrophysics, weighs only 22 pounds (10 kilograms). It carries a payload for measuring the brightness of stars, which allows researchers to monitor nearby stars for orbiting exoplanets that cause a brief drop in brightness as they block the starlight. This approach to finding and studying exoplanets is called the transit method. NASA's Kepler Space Telescope has detected more than 2,300 confirmed planets using this method, more than any other planet-hunting observatory. The agency's next large-scale, space-based planet-hunting observatory, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), is anticipated to discover thousands of exoplanets and scheduled to launch from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida on April 16. In the future, small satellites like ASTERIA could serve as a low-cost method to identify transiting exoplanets orbiting bright, Sun-like stars. These small satellites could be used to look for planetary transits when larger observatories are not available, and planets of interest could then be studied in more detail by other telescopes. Small satellites like ASTERIA could also be used to study certain star systems that are not within the field of view of larger observatories, and most significantly, focus on star systems that have planets with long orbits that require long observation campaigns. The ASTERIA team has now demonstrated that the satellite's payload can point directly and steadily at a bright source for an extended period of time, a key requirement for performing the precision photometry necessary to study exoplanets via the transit method. Holding steady on a faraway star is difficult because there are many things that subtly push and pull on the satellite, such as Earth's atmosphere and magnetic field. ASTERIA's payload achieved a pointing stability of 0.5 arcseconds RMS, which refers to the degree to which the payload wobbles away from its intended target over a 20-minute observation period. The pointing stability was repeated over multiple orbits, with the stars positioned on the same pixels on each orbit. "That's like being able to hit a quarter with a laser pointer from about a mile away," said Christopher Pong, the attitude and pointing control engineer for ASTERIA at JPL. "The laser beam has to stay inside the edge of the quarter, and then the satellite has to be able to hit that exact same quarter -- or star -- over multiple orbits around the Earth. So what we've accomplished is both stability and repeatability." The payload also employed a control system to reduce "noise" in the data created by temperature fluctuations in the satellite, another major hurdle for an instrument attempting to carefully monitor stellar brightness. During observations, the temperature of the controlled section of the detector fluctuates by less than 0.02 Fahrenheit (0.01 Kelvin, or 0.01 degree Celsius). Small satellites ASTERIA is a CubeSat, a type of small satellite consisting of "units" that are 10 centimeters cubed, or about 4 inches on each side. ASTERIA is the size of six CubeSat units, making it roughly 10 centimeters by 20 centimeters by 30 centimeters. With its two solar panels unfolded, the satellite is about as long as a skateboard. The ASTERIA mission utilized commercially available CubeSat hardware where possible, and is contributing to a general knowledge of how those components operate in space. "We're continuing to characterize CubeSat components that other missions are using or want to use," said Amanda Donner, mission assurance manager for ASTERIA at JPL. ASTERIA launched to the International Space Station in August 2017. Having been in space for more than 140 days, the satellite is operating on an extended mission through May. ASTERIA was developed under the Phaeton Program at JPL. Phaeton provides early-career hires, under the guidance of experienced mentors, with the challenges of a flight project. ASTERIA is a collaboration with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge; where Sara Seager is the principal investigator.

 

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JPL News - Day in Review

 

DAY IN REVIEW Von Karman Lecture Thursday: How Will Earth's Ecosystems Survive Under a Changing Climate? One of the largest uncertainties in projections of future climate change is how do terrestrial ecosystems (communities of land organisms and their environments) contribute to or help counteract the rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide. › Read more NASA's Juno Mission Provides Infrared Tour of Jupiter's North Pole A 3-D infrared movie depicts cyclones and anticyclones in Jupiter's polar regions, and the first detailed view of a dynamo powering the magnetic field of a planet beyond Earth. › Read the full story

 

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JPL News - Day in Review

 

DAY IN REVIEW Bound for Mars: Countdown to First Interplanetary Launch from California On May 5, millions of Californians may witness the historic first interplanetary launch from America's West Coast. › Read the full story Intricate Clouds of Jupiter See intricate cloud patterns in the northern hemisphere of Jupiter in this new view taken by NASA's Juno spacecraft. › Read the full story

 

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