PIA24967: Jupiter's Polar Vortices Over Five Years
 Target Name:  Jupiter
 Is a satellite of:  Sol (our sun)
 Mission:  Juno
 Spacecraft:  Juno
 Instrument:  JIRAM 
 Product Size:  1920 x 1080 pixels (w x h)
 Produced By:  SwRI
 Full-Res TIFF:  PIA24967.tif (3.473 MB)
 Full-Res JPEG:  PIA24967.jpg (299.1 kB)

Click on the image above to download a moderately sized image in JPEG format (possibly reduced in size from original)

Original Caption Released with Image:

This annotated composite image depicts the movement of the polar and circumpolar cyclones of Jupiter's south pole between 2016 (left) and 2021 (right) as seen by the Jovian Infrared Auroral Mapper (JIRAM) instrument aboard NASA's Juno spacecraft. In both images, five cyclones are arranged as a pentagon, with a sixth cyclone in the center (south pole).

JIRAM "sees" in infrared light not visible to the human eye. It was designed to capture the infrared light emerging from deep inside Jupiter, probing the weather layer down to 30 to 45 miles (50 to 70 kilometers) below Jupiter's cloud tops.

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

Image Credit:
NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/ASI/INAF/JIRAM

Image Addition Date:
2021-10-28