Tag Archives: Juno

In a landmark observation by a team of international researchers, NASA’s Juno spacecraft has, for the first time, clearly detected the auroras of Jupiter’s moon Callisto. This discovery completes the set of auroral signatures we have from all four Galilean moons: Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto. Like Earth, Jupiter experiences brilliant auroras around its poles — but something funky happens …

Jupiter hosts the brightest and most spectacular auroras in the Solar System. Near its poles, these shimmering lights offer a glimpse into how the planet interacts with the solar wind and moons swept by Jupiter’s magnetic field. Unlike Earth’s northern lights, the largest moons of Jupiter create their own auroral signatures in the planet’s atmosphere — a phenomenon that Earth’s …

Astronomers at the Pan-STARRS Observatory in Hawaii made history in 2017 when they detected ‘Oumuamua, the first interstellar object (ISO) ever observed. Two years later, the interstellar comet 2I/Borisov became the second ISO ever observed. And on July 1st, 2025, the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) in Rio Hurtado detected a third interstellar object in our Solar System, the …

Zoom image will be displayed The Juno spacecraft. (Image credit: NASA) The interstellar object 3I/ATLAS was discovered on July 1, 2025. It is expected to arrive at a distance of 53.6 million kilometers from Jupiter on March 16, 2026. In a new paper (accessible here) that I wrote with the brilliant Adam Hibberd and Adam Crowl, we show that applying …

NASA’s Juno spacecraft, which launched in 2011 to investigate Jupiter’s origin and evolution, travels through the solar system’s most intense planetary radiation fields. When the spacecraft’s JunoCam—a color, visible-light camera—began to suffer the consequences in December 2023, the mission team back on Earth had to think of a remote fix before they lost their chance to photograph the Jovian moon, …