Nasa’s Juno Spacecraft captures Frosted Cupcake like clouds on Jupiter!

Citizen scientist Gerald Eichstad used NASA's first renders from JunoCam to create an intresting animation which shows us swirling clouds on Jupiter  that also resemble frosted cupcakes. He also used some data from JunoCam’s visible-light camera onboard the Juno spacecraft, which has been orbiting the gas giant since 2016. 

           Photographs were especially taken during JunoCam’s 43rd  close Jupiter flyby at a nominal height of 13;536.3 Km’s above the gas giant’s cloud tops. In the 890-nanometer methane absorption band, the brighter cloud tops you perceive correspond to their higher height. Jupiter frequently seems smooth and marble-like. These picture reveal that the ferocious clouds have peaks and valleys like a rocky mountain range. Shadows in the upper atmosphere get the most intense sunlight, but as it descends, more and more of it is absorbed. Jupiter has 69,911 KM’s of radius and it is 11 times wider than Earth.

According to research by Juno, some of these clouds reach as far as 3,000 kilometers  that means 1,900 miles into the globe, which is a greater distance than US’s northern and  and southern boundaries. NASA’s Juno scientists are currently working on a calibration that translates these brightness landscapes into actual models of physical cloud-top elevation models.  

The Juno mission provides us with an opportunity to observe Jupiter in a way which is essentially inaccessible by Earth-based telescopic observations. We can look at the same cloud features from very different angles within only a few minutes. This has opened up a new opportunity to derive 3D elevation models of Jupiter’s cloud-tops. The images of the wonderful chaotic storms on Jupiter seem to come to life, showing clouds rising at different altitudes,” said Gerald Eichstädt, Citizen Scientist at the Europlanet Science Congress (EPSC) 2022 in Granada.