Nasa’s Juno mission to the gas giant Jupiter has reached its halfway mark and has revealed new views of cyclones at the poles.
As it orbits the planet every 53 days – Juno performs a science-gathering dive, speeding from pole to pole.
Its sensors take measurements of the composition of the planet, in an effort to decipher how the largest world in our Solar System formed.
Mapping the magnetic and gravity fields should also expose Jupiter’s structure.
But images from JunoCam – a camera that was intended to capture images that could be shared with the public – has already given us some surprising insights.
Dr Candice Hansen, from the Planetary Science Institute in Arizona, is leading the JunoCam project, which she described as “our little outreach camera”. She presented some of the remarkable images from the camera – raw images downloaded and processed by members of the public – at the American Geophysical Union meeting here in Washington DC.