How the Universe Works - S08E06 - When NASA Met Jupiter
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00:00NASA's revolutionary Juno probe is on a daring voyage to Jupiter.
00:08Its goal?
00:09To reveal the deepest mysteries of our solar system.
00:14Everything we see in the solar system today is affected by Jupiter somehow in the past
00:19or now.
00:20All the asteroids, all the planets, the moons, the comets, everything.
00:26So in many ways, Juno is actually giving us a view into the history of our planetary
00:30system, even the history of Earth.
00:33Juno's mission is risky.
00:35Jupiter could eat the spacecraft like that.
00:39But by diving perilously close to this monstrous world, Juno could change everything we know
00:46about our solar system.
00:48If you want to know what's happening, you've got to get up close and personal.
01:07Independence Day, 2016.
01:10Juno arrives at Jupiter and gets to work.
01:14The probe angles its high-resolution camera towards this stormy world.
01:20Juno's snaps don't disappoint.
01:29The images returned from Juno are just beautiful.
01:43Suddenly you have this magnificent mosaic of this planet.
01:52As a human being, I'm like, oh my gosh, look at this, this is amazing, this is coming back
01:56from Jupiter.
01:59These are the closest ever views of Jupiter, a world 500 million miles away.
02:14But we didn't send Juno just to take pictures.
02:19One of its main goals is to peer deep into Jupiter's dark heart.
02:24One of the big questions we have about Jupiter is, does it have a core?
02:29And you think, well, of course it has a core, like every planet has a core, the Earth has
02:33a core, everything does.
02:34Well, it turns out Jupiter might not.
02:39Knowing what lies at a planet's core allows scientists to wind back the clock billions
02:45of years to the formation of the planets.
02:50If Juno can reveal what lies deep within Jupiter, it could change our understanding
02:56of how the gas giant formed.
02:59If Juno finds a solid core, it could mean Jupiter first formed as a rocky planet like
03:05Earth, then kept growing.
03:09But if Juno finds no core, it could mean that Jupiter skipped the rocky stage and formed
03:15straight from a cloud of gas.
03:19Answering this question could shine a light on other mysteries, too.
03:26If we can figure out how Jupiter formed, we can figure out the rest of the story of the
03:31solar system.
03:34So how do you probe down into the interior of a planet when all you can really see are
03:38the very tops of the clouds?
03:40Well, incredibly, you can use gravity.
03:43As Juno orbits Jupiter, it can sense in its orbit tiny little variations in the gravitational
03:53pull of Jupiter.
03:55As Juno speeds towards Jupiter, gravitational spikes tug at the craft.
04:01It turns out some parts of Jupiter are denser than others.
04:06If Jupiter were some solid ball, then as Juno passes by it, as it passes very close above
04:11its cloud tops, the orbit, the trajectory, would be very smooth.
04:15But in fact, if Jupiter has layers, or places where there's more mass and places where there's
04:21less, then it's going to pull on Juno a little bit differently.
04:26Passing over areas of concentrated mass gives Juno a speed boost.
04:32So what they do is, the engineers back on Earth can basically just say, how fast is
04:36it moving right now?
04:38How about now?
04:39How about now?
04:40And they can build up a map of where the mass is in Jupiter underneath the spacecraft as
04:46it passes around.
04:51Juno's instruments begin to map out the heart of the gas giant, revealing the mysterious
04:56core for the first time.
05:00What Juno found was this amorphous mass, a fuzzy thing, in the center of Jupiter.
05:04It's not as solid as we expected, if it were just a metal and rock core, but there is something
05:11there.
05:12In the center of the planet, Juno detects hydrogen and rocky material dissolved and
05:18blended together.
05:19It's a type of planetary core we've never seen before.
05:25Astronomers are describing it as fuzzy.
05:28We thought we were going to find an avocado, instead we found a bowl of chili.
05:34It's a hydrogen fluid chili con carne.
05:40So none of our models of the interior of Jupiter turned out to be correct.
05:44That means we have to go back to the drawing board.
05:48One theory is that Jupiter didn't form from rocks or gas, but from tiny pebbles, less
05:53than an inch wide, strewn across the early solar system, 4.6 billion years ago.
06:02These pebbles came together, they accreted, to form a massive object that was the sort
06:07of seed, the core of Jupiter.
06:10The swarm of pebbles clumped together to form one giant core, 20 times the mass of Earth.
06:18But these pebbles can't sustain this growing planet for long.
06:23Eventually we need to make a jump from those centimeter sized particles up to really large
06:27things like 100 kilometer planetesimals to really kickstart growth of a planet.
06:34As Jupiter grows, its appetite becomes insatiable.
06:39The cores of other would-be planets are drawn in by its immense pull and absorbed on impact,
06:47causing Jupiter's core to transform.
06:50Huge chunks of incoming rock are mixed up with gas and the pebbles that originally built
06:56the core.
06:58We think that the core material that might have been there is actually dissolved and
07:03mixed in with the rest of the planet.
07:06This mix of rock gas and pebbles leaves the core in a strange state, somewhere between
07:11solid and liquid, or in other words, fuzzy.
07:16Once Jupiter's core reaches a critical mass, its gravity starts sucking in all nearby hydrogen
07:23and gas, building the iconic Jovian atmosphere and leaving the fuzzy core trapped beneath
07:30thousands of miles of thick plows.
07:34And that is what formed Jupiter as we know and love it today.
07:38Juno's discovery of Jupiter's fuzzy core could rewrite the book on Jupiter's early
07:43years.
07:44But Juno's just getting started.
07:47We haven't even scratched the surface of the number of mysteries there are.
07:53There is more to Jupiter than meets the eye as Juno's instruments begin to reveal a
08:00darker side to this giant world.
08:03Jupiter's environment is one of the most vicious in the solar system and that's because
08:09of its incredibly strong magnetic field.
08:12And Juno is caught right in the middle of it.
08:18The gas giant Jupiter holds clues to the mysteries of our solar system, and in 2011, NASA launches
08:29a billion-dollar mission to uncover them.
08:323, 2, 1, ignition and liftoff of the Atlas V with Juno on a trek to Jupiter.
08:44To reach its target, Juno embarks on a five-year journey.
08:51Sending any spacecraft to another planet is going to be tough, but sending one to Jupiter
08:56is really pushing things pretty hard.
09:00Juno weaves through the solar system with extreme precision.
09:05The craft battles violent temperature changes and navigates carefully through the asteroid
09:10belt.
09:11If there's a fleck of dust in your path and that thing slams into your spacecraft, it
09:16can do significant damage.
09:191.7 billion miles into its mission, Juno finally nears its target.
09:25But the probe is hurtling towards Jupiter at 165,000 miles per hour.
09:33Juno is moving really fast.
09:35It's one of the fastest spacecraft ever.
09:38You need to go fast enough to get there, but then you need to be slow enough to be captured
09:42by the gravity of that planet.
09:43You need to get it just right.
09:46Get it wrong, and Juno could slam into the planet or drift out to deep space.
09:57To successfully get Juno to enter a stable orbit around Jupiter is almost the same as,
10:02say, shooting a basketball from London and having it land on the front of the rim in
10:06New York and just sitting there balanced.
10:09I could do it, but can NASA do it with Juno?
10:18NASA has a neat game plan.
10:21Juno performs a backflip in space and fires its thruster towards Jupiter.
10:26Everything is going smoothly.
10:27We're continuing to burn and change our velocity.
10:31The rocket burns for 35 nail-biting minutes, reducing the craft's speed by 1,200 miles
10:37per hour.
10:46Finally the probe achieves orbit around Jupiter.
10:49Right on July 4th, during the fireworks, we just got into orbit.
10:53In many ways, we're firing our rocket motor.
10:55I mean, it is fireworks.
11:00Back in orbit, Juno turns its instruments to the planet for a critical part of the mission,
11:06investigating Jupiter's magnetic field.
11:11Deep below the stormy surface, liquid metallic hydrogen flows endlessly around the planet,
11:18producing a huge magnetic field.
11:22This magnetosphere stretches over 600 million miles beyond the planet, reaching all the
11:28way to Saturn.
11:35To reveal the true scale of Jupiter's magnetosphere, planetary scientist Janie Radabaugh hits the
11:41beach.
11:42I've made a little solar system.
11:45So we'll start here at the sun, and we come out here to the earth, and now we're going
11:50to skip a few and go out to Jupiter.
11:52And Jupiter is five times as far away from the sun as the earth.
11:55Now we'll go out to Saturn.
11:58Saturn here is 10 times as far away from the sun as the earth.
12:01And we want to look at the size of Jupiter's magnetic field.
12:04So we want to draw out the magnetic field of Jupiter.
12:07Arcs around like this, away from the sun, because the solar wind is impacting the magnetic
12:12field, dragging it downwind.
12:15So here it comes downwind on both sides, all the way out to the orbit of Saturn.
12:25Jupiter's magnetosphere stretches over 600 million miles beyond the planet.
12:31When you think about structures in our solar system, of course you think of the giant sun,
12:35you think of massive planets like Jupiter.
12:38But one of the largest things in the solar system are things we really can't see.
12:42And in fact, the magnetic field of Jupiter and all of the particles trapped in it are
12:46one of the largest things the solar system has to offer.
12:49If your eyes could actually see Jupiter's magnetosphere, and you tried to look at it
12:54while standing on earth, it would look about as big in the sky as the moon.
13:00And within this magnetic field, Juno faces an invisible threat.
13:06Jupiter has an enormous magnetic field.
13:09It is so enormous in terms of space, but also in terms of power.
13:15As Jupiter is bombarded by the solar wind, high energy particles from the sun are funneled
13:21into deadly radiation belts, guided by the giant planet's magnetic field.
13:27The magnetic field traps charged particles coming from the sun and circulates them around
13:33that system, and just bombards anything in the vicinity, including our fragile little spacecraft.
13:42Close to the planet, radiation levels are up to 30 times greater than inside the reactor
13:47core room during the Chernobyl disaster.
13:51This is radiation.
13:53This is bad news.
13:55These particles, they would hit you.
13:56They would rupture your DNA, rupture your cell structures, and you would die.
14:02This blistering radiation is bad news for the spacecraft, too.
14:08The charged particles threaten to destroy electronic and navigational systems.
14:13But Juno has armored up.
14:17It's not some delicate, beautiful, gossamer thing that you are sending to orbit Jupiter.
14:23It's more like a tank.
14:25You have to protect this thing, or else it's not going to last very long at all.
14:32We've got a couple hundred pounds of titanium on the spacecraft just trying to shield us
14:37from what Jupiter might throw at us.
14:39So it is, in a sense, we're like an armored tank going into war.
14:44Lightweight titanium is tough.
14:47Juno's half-inch-thick shielding blocks 99% of Jupiter's vicious radiation.
14:52But even at this reduced rate, Juno can't survive the bombardment for long.
14:57So the craft sets itself on a unique orbit, around the gas giant.
15:07It actually has a very long orbit where it spends most of its time far away.
15:12And then every once in a while it dives in, goes, oh, hot, hot, hot, too much, and then
15:16goes safely away to communicate and process, and then back in again.
15:21Juno takes a mighty gamble, diving deep into these radiation belts to achieve one of its
15:27key objectives, mapping Jupiter's giant magnetic field.
15:32And as Juno swoops around the planet, it reveals something scientists had never seen before.
15:40Planetary scientist Dan Derda demonstrates.
15:44We can use a pretty simple, even elementary school-level experiment here of the science
15:49of the structure of the Earth's magnetic field by shaking some iron filings across
15:55the surface of a very simple barbed magnet with a north and a south pole.
15:59Earth's magnetic field forms a perfect bubble around our planet, protecting us from solar
16:04radiation and cosmic rays.
16:06I can get these little iron filings to come out here, and already I can see the sort of
16:12classic outlines of the north and south magnetic field lines that are coming out of our planet.
16:18The Earth's magnetic field is pretty well behaved in this way.
16:21It's what we call a dipolar field.
16:23It has a very distinct north magnetic pole and south magnetic pole.
16:27Lucky for us, Earth's magnetic field is pretty stable.
16:31But new results from Juno suggest that Jupiter may not be so fortunate.
16:37Jupiter's magnetic field is much more complex than this.
16:40Jupiter's not going to play by those rules.
16:42Its magnetic field is going to do whatever it wants.
16:46And the generation of that magnetic field is so complex and so twisted and so wild that
16:53the magnetic field is going to have very, very strange shapes that we're just now beginning
16:59to understand.
17:00When you look at the Earth, we have a fairly simple magnetic field.
17:03It's like a giant bar magnet with a north and a south magnetic pole.
17:07Well, Jupiter has that as well.
17:09This is called a dipolar field.
17:11It's got two poles.
17:13But it also has a third pole.
17:17Juno's magnetic field map shows a north and south pole and a bizarre magnetic disturbance
17:23at Jupiter's equator.
17:25And it's like Jupiter just sprouted a third arm and that's kind of mysterious.
17:32On magnetic field maps, north poles show up red and south poles blue.
17:37So scientists are calling this second south pole the great blue spot.
17:42Everyone knows about the great red spot, but Jupiter now has a great blue spot as well.
17:48This magnetic disturbance reflects Jupiter's stormy interior.
17:53You have these fast moving winds blowing on the magnetic field and they're actually shearing
17:59it apart and moving the field around.
18:01It's not necessarily a storm, although it could be.
18:04It maybe is better to think of it as a magnetic storm.
18:10Turbulence inside Jupiter could be twisting up the magnetic field to drive the great blue spot
18:16and the deadly radiation belts that Juno must navigate through.
18:21Unlike Earth, Jupiter is not really a solid mass for the most part.
18:26So all of its clouds and gases are moving at slightly different rates.
18:31And that actually makes the magnetic field that's generated be very variable and highly changing.
18:38For us to have a variable magnetic field like Jupiter does, the entire Earth would have to be molten.
18:44We really don't want that to happen.
18:46With each orbit of Jupiter, Juno unravels more mysteries of this giant planet.
18:51But Jupiter's deepest secret could shine a light on our own origins.
18:57If we want to understand the Earth and our place in the solar system,
19:00Juno has found a lot of those mysteries are locked up there in Jupiter.
19:10The Juno spacecraft is uncovering the secrets of Jupiter, from its swirling cloud tops to its dark heart.
19:18But Juno's discoveries go beyond the gas giant itself.
19:23They could answer mysteries about our own planet too.
19:28Jupiter is the key to the formation of the solar system,
19:33which means it's the key to understanding how the Earth formed.
19:37Juno is actually giving us a view into the history of our planetary system, even the history of Earth.
19:434.6 billion years ago, a mammoth cloud of hydrogen gas and cosmic dust collapses, sparking nuclear fusion.
19:55From the resulting chaos, one star, four rocky worlds and four gassy giants are born to form our solar system.
20:08There's these distinct zones of the solar system, rocky and metallic in the inner part,
20:12gaseous and water-rich in the outer part.
20:14And even without thinking about that too hard, it kind of makes sense,
20:18because in close to the sun, it's warmer. Out farther away from the sun, it's cooler.
20:25But the Earth breaks the mold.
20:28Our planet has far more life-giving water than theories predict.
20:33The Earth formed in a part of the solar system that you'd think normally should be probably pretty dry,
20:37because it was pretty close to the sun.
20:40Our planet is just 150 million miles from the sun, putting us inside what scientists call the snow line.
20:49Inside this line, the sun is powerful enough to evaporate water during a planet's formation.
20:58Inside the snow line, the temperatures are high and there's a lot of energy from the sun nearby.
21:03Too close to the sun, those gaseous and ice-rich materials just can't exist.
21:08They're evaporated away by the heat of the sun.
21:12Our watery world should be a dry rock in space.
21:17Understanding how water got to the Earth is so important, because it wouldn't be there in the very, very beginning.
21:23But Jupiter could hold the answer to this mystery.
21:28To solve the riddle of Earth's water, Juno aims to discover where Jupiter was born.
21:35Understanding how and where and when Jupiter formed is critical,
21:39because it has really dominated the entire evolution of the solar system.
21:44It's the biggest planet by far. It's the biggest thing out there that's moving everything around.
21:50Any water in the early solar system could have been moved around by Jupiter's mighty gravity.
21:56So if Juno can trace Jupiter's history, that could explain why we find H2O where it's least expected.
22:05We know that planets can move closer to the sun and farther out while they're forming and even after they form.
22:11So how do we figure out where Jupiter formed?
22:15The key is how much water is locked up inside Jupiter.
22:19If we can understand how Jupiter built a relationship with water,
22:24we can understand how water got distributed all throughout the solar system, including here on Earth.
22:33If Juno can measure the water content of Jupiter, it will solve a 20-year-old mystery.
22:41December 1995, NASA's Galileo probe begins a fatal dive into Jupiter's atmosphere.
22:50When it did, it was able to measure the atmosphere around it and detect water.
22:57And the thing is, it didn't. It didn't find any. And that's weird.
23:02Everything was bone dry. So why in the world did Jupiter's atmosphere look dry?
23:08If the results from the Galileo probe are correct, then 4.6 billion years ago, Jupiter formed closer to the sun.
23:17But that's not the whole story.
23:20Twenty years later, NASA sends Juno to get a second opinion.
23:25Juno 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.
23:34Juno doesn't have to risk its life to hunt for water.
23:38The craft peers through Jupiter's thick clouds using a microwave radiometer to detect H2O from a safe distance.
23:46Using these microwaves, Juno builds up a global map of Jupiter's water.
23:52What Juno has found is, yeah, there's plenty of water in Jupiter.
23:57It's just that Galileo happened to hit a dry spot.
24:00But in fact, if it had come in almost anywhere else, it would have seen plenty of water.
24:05Juno's findings may give scientists the clue to understanding where Jupiter originally formed.
24:12It seems apparent now that Jupiter didn't form in its present location.
24:19The leading theory is that Jupiter formed just beyond the snow line,
24:24the boundary between the dry inner solar system and the wet outer solar system.
24:28But we find Jupiter is twice as far away from the sun as where that original snow line would have been.
24:34So this is telling us something interesting.
24:38Jupiter may have wandered from its original position, causing unimaginable chaos.
24:44As Jupiter moved around, things got hit and knocked out of the solar system.
24:49It essentially scatters everything in its path. It's the biggest player. It's the biggest planet.
24:53It essentially scatters everything in its path. It's the biggest player. It's the biggest planet.
24:58Everything moves for it.
25:01As Jupiter bulldozes towards the outer solar system,
25:06it slings ice-rich asteroids and comets in towards the sun and towards Earth.
25:15Jupiter would literally, in some sense, have snow plowed into the inner solar system,
25:20a whole wave of water-rich planetesimals that would have delivered much of our Earth's oceans.
25:27Juno has helped answer why Earth is habitable, despite being so close to the sun.
25:33So it was worth going all that distance, sending Juno all the way out there to get that closer look.
25:42Our solar system plays host to some epic natural wonders.
25:47The ice geysers of Enceladus.
25:50The giant rings of Saturn.
25:53The Martian mega-volcano Olympus Mons.
25:57But in July 2017, NASA's Juno probe skims the surface of Jupiter
26:03and photographs the most famous natural wonder.
26:07A fierce, hurricane-like storm that's been raging for hundreds of years.
26:12When you think of Jupiter, one of the most visually stunning,
26:16most iconic features of the atmosphere is that Great Red Spot.
26:20There is nothing like Jupiter's Red Spot in our entire solar system.
26:24As Juno soars over the Great Red Spot,
26:28it looks down onto a storm over 10,000 miles across.
26:36This is the most extreme storm.
26:38The winds are blowing continuously at 400 miles an hour.
26:45Earth's most powerful Category 5 hurricanes
26:49are less than half as powerful as the storm on Jupiter.
26:55The Great Red Spot is the greatest hurricane that you've ever imagined.
27:00But that's not all.
27:02Juno's microwave radiometer allows scientists to see through Jupiter.
27:06Jupiter allows scientists to see through Jupiter's cloud layers for the first time.
27:12Juno has instrumentation that's able to look underneath.
27:16So one of the things we did was we looked at how deep are the roots.
27:20Juno peers down into the eye of this monster storm.
27:24It spots temperature changes that follow the storm's iconic shape,
27:29tracing the roots of the Great Red Spot deep into the Jovian atmosphere.
27:35They found out that it goes down over 200 miles deep into the atmosphere.
27:40There's nothing like that on Earth.
27:43Weather satellites circling the Earth show the greatest cyclones of our planet
27:48can reach heights of around 10 miles.
27:51But Jupiter's Great Red Spot is 20 times taller.
27:56I think that really brings into perspective the massive scale of this planet.
28:00The dizzying depths of the storm is made possible by Jupiter's vast hidden atmosphere,
28:06a seemingly endless spinning mass made up of hydrogen and helium.
28:11Jupiter doesn't have a solid surface like the Earth does.
28:16And so right away, if you were to dive into Jupiter's clouds,
28:20things are going to be really different.
28:22This atmosphere is tremendously thick.
28:24So as you're going in, the pressure is going up.
28:26As soon as you start plunging down into that atmosphere,
28:29there's more and more.
28:31There's not just 100 miles of air.
28:33There's 1,000 miles of air or 10,000 miles of air above you.
28:36And not only would your ears pop deep in the Jovian atmosphere,
28:41your entire body would pop.
28:43And in fact, all of your molecules would pop.
28:47Juno's vast turbulent atmosphere hosts the deepest storm mankind has ever seen.
28:53And Juno's discoveries get scientists wondering,
28:57could the Great Red Spot be behind another of Jupiter's mysteries,
29:02the planet's surprisingly warm atmosphere?
29:08Jupiter lurks out in our outer solar system, where everything is very cold.
29:13The sun is very dim when you get that far away.
29:16Jupiter is five times farther from the sun than we are.
29:19So it's only getting 4% of the amount of energy from the sun that we do.
29:24But there's something heating up the atmosphere of Jupiter.
29:27There are parts of it that are many times warmer than we can explain with sunlight.
29:31The question is, of course, where is that energy coming from?
29:35Juno swoops in for another pass on Jupiter,
29:39turning its high-resolution cameras on the raging storm below.
29:45The storm unleashes a massive storm.
29:48The storm unleashes vicious turbulence into the surrounding atmosphere,
29:53giving scientists the clue they need to explain the planet's high temperature.
29:59The Great Red Spot is a giant hurricane that's powered by heat deep in the core of Jupiter.
30:06But it has such violent and chaotic motion, it's mixing up the atmosphere around it.
30:13The thunderstorms on Jupiter are going to be generating booming thunder
30:17just the same way that they do here on the Earth.
30:21Thunder clouds send sound waves rippling through the storm.
30:29A sound wave is a wave of pressure, of compression,
30:35where air molecules or water molecules get compacted.
30:39They get squeezed together.
30:41And when you squeeze something together, they're a lot closer together,
30:44and they're going to get pretty hot.
30:48These sound waves shoot up 500 miles above the storm,
30:53where they break, converting sound energy into heat.
30:58These sound waves, they crash together,
31:01creating a tremendous amount of energy and heating the gases around them.
31:04The Great Red Spot has helped heat the Jovian atmosphere for hundreds of years.
31:10But new images suggest that this may be about to change.
31:15Jupiter's Red Spot is so big.
31:18I mean, it's bigger than Earth by a long shot.
31:21It seems like it would be an incredibly stable thing.
31:25It's just there, and it's always been there, and it always will be.
31:28Recently, we've seen it changing.
31:30When NASA's Voyager space probe visited Jupiter in 1979,
31:35it observed a storm twice the diameter of Earth.
31:39In 2017, Juno's images show the Great Red Spot has lost one-third of its width.
31:47But that's not all.
31:49Despite the storm's shrinking size, it's actually getting taller.
31:54The Great Red Spot is being stretched and forced into Jupiter's upper atmosphere.
32:00The storms in the Great Red Spot is kind of like the clay on a potter's wheel,
32:05where as you bring your hands closer together to draw the clay in,
32:09the closer your hands are, the taller the pottery becomes.
32:13And similarly for the storm, as it becomes smaller at the base,
32:17it raises taller toward the upper atmosphere.
32:19It's getting taller, and we see storms do the same thing on Earth,
32:23and when it does that, the wind shear will actually take the top of the storm off and drag it apart.
32:28And so we'll be watching it very intently over the next few years
32:31to see if that's what happens on Jupiter as well.
32:35It may be only a matter of time before Jupiter's high-altitude winds
32:39tear the iconic storm to shreds.
32:42The most famous storm of our solar system,
32:45may soon disappear, but Juno reveals other storms
32:49hidden in the strangest of places.
32:59NASA's Juno probe has voyaged billions of miles across the solar system
33:04to reveal the mysteries of gas giant Jupiter.
33:08But there's one part of Jupiter that has remained intact.
33:11Before Juno, our view of Jupiter was very limited.
33:14We'd never actually flown over the poles.
33:17It's something that's very hard to do on Jupiter.
33:20We don't have other missions that have done this.
33:23In August 2016, Juno's flight plan takes the spacecraft into unknown territory
33:29to reveal Jupiter's mysterious polar regions for the first time.
33:35Like a comet, Juno's flight plan takes the spacecraft into unknown territory
33:39for the first time.
33:41When the first time we looked at the pole,
33:43it didn't look anything like the Jupiter we knew.
33:48We never would have guessed that was Jupiter if somebody had shown that to us.
33:54Juno's camera reveals a strange blue expanse that puzzles scientists.
34:02The electric color could be due to chemical changes in the clouds,
34:06brought on by a lack of sunlight.
34:09But what Juno spots inside the blue clouds is even stranger.
34:16Giant central cyclones spin around each pole at 200 miles per hour,
34:21with these cyclones surrounded by eight stormy vortices in the north
34:26and five in the south.
34:31There are these weird cyclones, gigantic swirls, vortices,
34:35of gas swirling around Jupiter's poles.
34:37And they're clearly forming patterns.
34:40It's hard to get a sense of scale here.
34:42Now the North Polar Central Cyclone, that one right at the pole,
34:46that's 2,500 miles across.
34:49That is almost as big as the continental United States.
34:52What is going on there?
34:54This is nothing like what we see on Earth.
34:59On Earth, our weather is driven by heat from the sun.
35:04It hits our planet at the equator,
35:05and flows across the surface.
35:08Powerful cyclones form over tropical waters
35:12and move around the planet.
35:15But the polar regions receive less energy from the sun,
35:19so cyclones can't form at the poles.
35:22We see that if you're at the equator, it's warmer and it's stormier.
35:26If you're at the poles, where the sun is slightly harder to see,
35:30that activity goes away.
35:31But the weather on Jupiter couldn't be more different.
35:35We see lightning and convective thunderstorms at the poles of Jupiter,
35:39but not at the equator.
35:41And that's sort of the opposite of what we see on the Earth.
35:43The question is, what's driving Jupiter's storms?
35:48Jupiter is five times further away from the sun than the Earth,
35:52and receives only a fraction of the sun's energy.
35:55And unlike Earth, Jupiter's polar regions seem to be more active.
35:59Jupiter's polar regions seem to be where the action is.
36:03Something is driving the planet's weird weather.
36:07And Juno's scans of the giant planet's thermal emissions
36:11suggest it could be Jupiter itself.
36:14We can actually see the internal heat of Jupiter coming right up through.
36:19And so Jupiter will look very bright in areas where we can see that heat.
36:24Juno detects searing heat beneath Jupiter's cloud bands.
36:29Jupiter has so much material, so much mass, so much gravity,
36:33that the interior is incredibly dense and very, very hot.
36:36At the core, it's probably many thousands of degrees hotter than the surface of the sun.
36:42This fiery inferno buried in Jupiter's dark heart
36:46is a relic from its birth billions of years ago.
36:50The violent collisions that formed the planet
36:53leave its core seething hot,
36:56a heat that remains to this day,
36:58buried under thousands of miles of insulating gas.
37:02As the heat slowly leaks outwards,
37:05Jupiter's fast-rotating atmosphere gets churned up
37:09into vicious cyclones and thunderstorms.
37:12And that's what's really driving most of the weather.
37:15It's not the sun. It's Jupiter itself.
37:19And as Juno soars above the planet,
37:22it reveals another weather mystery.
37:24The craft detects bursts of radio waves,
37:28spiking up to four times a second,
37:31a telltale sign of ferocious lightning strikes.
37:37Clouds are moving around in the atmosphere,
37:40building up electric charge,
37:42and causing bolts of lightning to form.
37:44And we've actually seen this with the Juno spacecraft.
37:47These are megastorms,
37:50orders of magnitude bigger than here on Earth.
37:53And Juno finds that there's more to these thunderclouds
37:57than just flashes of light.
38:00Giant icy hailstones of water and ammonia,
38:04the chemical which gives Jupiter's clouds their orange color.
38:12High up in Jupiter's atmosphere,
38:14the ammonia is mixing with the water,
38:18and it becomes a liquid ball of water.
38:20And it becomes a liquid ball that starts to collect ice around it.
38:25And it will fall like hail does, deep into Jupiter's atmosphere.
38:31On Earth, hail falls to the ground.
38:34But on Jupiter, there is no ground.
38:38It gets lifted in the atmosphere because of an updraft,
38:41and then more ice, and it builds bigger,
38:43and then it falls down, and then it gets carried back up.
38:46And so hail is often many layers being built.
38:51These icy balls grow layer by layer
38:54as they soar up and down the atmosphere.
38:57If they formed in storms here on Earth,
39:00they'd cause some serious damage.
39:03So if you were buzzing around Jupiter
39:06and you were near where these storms were,
39:09you might get hit by hail coming up or going down.
39:13This is one of the most violent, energetic atmospheres
39:17in the entire solar system.
39:21Juno is revealing Jupiter's hidden secrets.
39:30On Earth, dazzling auroras light up the skies
39:34as charged particles from the Sun
39:37interact with atoms high in the atmosphere.
39:40Deep in the outer solar system,
39:43Jupiter is too far from the Sun
39:46for strong auroras to form in this way.
39:48But high above the giant planet's poles,
39:52Juno spots a seemingly impossible light show.
39:58The auroras of Jupiter are tremendously larger
40:02than the ones that we find here on Earth.
40:04In fact, the auroral rings near the poles
40:06are bigger than our planet itself.
40:08Jupiter's auroras emit primarily ultraviolet and X-ray light,
40:12so you can't see it with the naked human eye.
40:14But if you could see them and you were at Jupiter,
40:16that would be an amazing light show,
40:19because those auroras are strong.
40:25These glowing displays are evidence of charged particles
40:29slamming into Jupiter's atmosphere.
40:32But if they're not coming from the Sun,
40:35where are they coming from?
40:38Hunting for an answer,
40:40Juno snaps an image of Jupiter's southern lights
40:43with its ultraviolet imaging spectrometer.
40:46Inside the aurora,
40:48it glimpses something strange.
40:51When Juno studied the lights coming from the aurora on Jupiter,
40:56it found that they were even stronger than expected.
40:59And in fact, when you look at Jupiter's poles
41:02in wavelengths that our eyes can't see,
41:04for example, ultraviolet,
41:06you see a hotspot.
41:08This hotspot marks the point
41:11where huge concentrations of charged particles
41:14strike Jupiter's atmosphere,
41:16increasing their trajectory,
41:18reveals the culprit of Jupiter's dazzling light shows,
41:22the volcanoes of Jupiter's powerful moons.
41:27Jupiter's moon Io
41:29has hundreds of active volcanoes spewing out materials
41:32way out into space,
41:34and many of those get trapped by the magnetic field of Jupiter.
41:37Io's volcanoes fire out jets of charged particles,
41:42which are swept up by the giant planet's magnetic field.
41:46They're particles down and slamming into specific spots
41:49in Jupiter's atmosphere.
41:51But Io isn't the only moon
41:54responsible for Jupiter's polar light show.
41:57If we go further out,
41:59Europa, Ganymede, Callisto,
42:01those are more icy,
42:03don't necessarily have volcanoes.
42:05These icy moons
42:07twist up Jupiter's magnetic field.
42:10Some of these moons have magnetic fields
42:13that interact with Jupiter's magnetic field,
42:14and that actually intensifies
42:16the aurora display on Jupiter.
42:19Jupiter's moons work together
42:21to energize the greatest northern lights
42:24in the solar system.
42:26But in these beautiful displays
42:28is a stark reminder
42:30of the danger Juno faces.
42:33When you look at these pictures of the aurora on Jupiter
42:35and you think, oh, that's beautiful,
42:37wouldn't it be great to see that in person?
42:39The answer is no, no it wouldn't,
42:41because they will kill you.
42:42What's causing these displays
42:44are subatomic particles
42:46accelerated to tremendously high speeds
42:48by the magnetic fields involved.
42:51The radiation around Jupiter is lethal.
42:56The lifetime of the Juno mission
42:58is very limited by the extreme conditions
43:00it has to survive in.
43:02We think that in the future
43:04a lot of the instruments will be so radiated
43:06they won't really work anymore.
43:08When Juno's titanium armor fails,
43:10Jupiter's deadly radiation
43:12will damage the craft beyond repair.
43:16So the team plans to go out with a bang,
43:19thrusting Juno into Jupiter's atmosphere,
43:22where the craft will be torn apart.
43:26Eventually it will be drawn down
43:28into Jupiter's depths
43:30and become a part of the planet itself.
43:32Before then,
43:34Juno has many more mysteries to unlock.
43:37We'll answer some questions
43:38and we'll raise some more,
43:40that's what I expect,
43:42and we'll get some fantastic images.
43:45Every single thing has turned out to be a surprise.
43:48There are so many things
43:50that Juno has opened our eyes to
43:52that I can't imagine having not sent it.
43:54So we're in for at least a year more
43:56of the most profound surprises about Jupiter.
43:59What we're learning,
44:01what we're unlocking,
44:03not just about Jupiter,
44:05but the formation of the solar system
44:06and the potential formation of life itself
44:09here on Earth.
44:11It's mind-blowing.