‘How About Interplanetary Pizza Day?’ NASA’s Juno Mission Saw ‘Pepperoni’ Storms on Jupiter’s North Pole

NASA's Juno mission has spotted “pepperoni” storms on Jupiter. The space agency released the news on National Pizza Day, making the Jupiter storms all the more interesting for us. NASA released a video of the north pole of the giant planet on its Instagram handle. There we can see a dense formation of storms in red and yellow hues. NASA explained the colour of the storms and the occurrence in the caption. Adding quirk to the post, the space agency wrote, “National Pizza Day? How about Interplanetary Pizza Day? Our Juno mission saw ‘pepperoni' storms topping Jupiter.”

Indeed, the storms resemble the red pepperoni on a pizza. But there's more to it than meets the eye. The image is not a regular photograph. It is an infrared image of the north pole of Jupiter. That's how the colouration in the video was achieved.

The caption added: “The movie utilises imagery derived from data collected by the Jovian Infrared Auroral Mapper (JIRAM) up instrument aboard our NASA Solar System Exploration mission Juno.”

The caption also explained the significance of the yellow and red gradients. The areas shown in yellow are deeper into Jupiter's atmosphere and hence, are warmer. The red regions are higher in Jupiter's atmosphere and depict colder areas.

The image was captured to depict “brightness temperature”, which is “a measurement of the radiance, at 5um, travelling upward from the top of the atmosphere towards Juno”. The brightness temperature is expressed in units of temperature, the highest being 260K (about -13 degrees Celsius) and the lowest being around 190K (about -83 degrees Celsius).

The images were captured during Juno's fourth pass over Jupiter on February 2, 2017.

The 14-second video has garnered over seven lakh views till now.

Here is the video released by NASA:

NASA regularly shares stunning images of outer space on its official Instagram page. Often, the space agency collects data from multiple telescopes and observatories in order to bring to us mind-boggling pictures of galaxies and stars. Recently, NASA's Hubble Space Telescope released an image of a group of three galaxies, about 425 million light-years from the Earth. In the image, the three galaxies seem to be interacting with each other. From the image, NASA stated, it appeared that the two galaxies on the upper right look like a starship known as the USS Enterprise from the American science fiction media franchise Star Trek.