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By NASA
6 min read
Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater)
JunoCam, the visible light imager aboard NASA’s Juno, captured this enhanced-color view of Ju-piter’s northern high latitudes from an altitude of about 36,000 miles (58,000 kilometers) above the giant planet’s cloud tops during the spacecraft’s 69th flyby on Jan. 28, 2025. Image data: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS Image processing: Jackie Branc (CC BY) New data from the agency’s Jovian orbiter sheds light on the fierce winds and cyclones of the gas giant’s northern reaches and volcanic action on its fiery moon.
NASA’s Juno mission has gathered new findings after peering below Jupiter’s cloud-covered atmosphere and the surface of its fiery moon, Io. Not only has the data helped develop a new model to better understand the fast-moving jet stream that encircles Jupiter’s cyclone-festooned north pole, it’s also revealed for the first time the subsurface temperature profile of Io, providing insights into the moon’s inner structure and volcanic activity.
Team members presented the findings during a news briefing in Vienna on Tuesday, April 29, at the European Geosciences Union General Assembly.
“Everything about Jupiter is extreme. The planet is home to gigantic polar cyclones bigger than Australia, fierce jet streams, the most volcanic body in our solar system, the most powerful aurora, and the harshest radiation belts,” said Scott Bolton, principal investigator of Juno at the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. “As Juno’s orbit takes us to new regions of Jupiter’s complex system, we’re getting a closer look at the immensity of energy this gas giant wields.”
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Made with data from the JIRAM instrument aboard NASA’s Juno, this animation shows the south polar region of Jupiter’s moon Io during a Dec. 27, 2024, flyby. The bright spots are locations with higher temperatures caused by volcanic activity; the gray areas resulted when Io left the field of view.NASA/JPL/SwRI/ASI – JIRAM Team (A.M.) Lunar Radiator
While Juno’s microwave radiometer (MWR) was designed to peer beneath Jupiter’s cloud tops, the team has also trained the instrument on Io, combining its data with Jovian Infrared Auroral Mapper (JIRAM) data for deeper insights.
“The Juno science team loves to combine very different datasets from very different instruments and see what we can learn,” said Shannon Brown, a Juno scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. “When we incorporated the MWR data with JIRAM’s infrared imagery, we were surprised by what we saw: evidence of still-warm magma that hasn’t yet solidified below Io’s cooled crust. At every latitude and longitude, there were cooling lava flows.”
The data suggests that about 10% of the moon’s surface has these remnants of slowly cooling lava just below the surface. The result may help provide insight into how the moon renews its surface so quickly as well as how as well as how heat moves from its deep interior to the surface.
“Io’s volcanos, lava fields, and subterranean lava flows act like a car radiator,” said Brown, “efficiently moving heat from the interior to the surface, cooling itself down in the vacuum of space.”
Looking at JIRAM data alone, the team also determined that the most energetic eruption in Io’s history (first identified by the infrared imager during Juno’s Dec. 27, 2024, Io flyby) was still spewing lava and ash as recently as March 2. Juno mission scientists believe it remains active today and expect more observations on May 6, when the solar-powered spacecraft flies by the fiery moon at a distance of about 55,300 miles (89,000 kilometers).
This composite image, derived from data collected in 2017 by the JIRAM instrument aboard NASA’s Juno, shows the central cyclone at Jupiter’s north pole and the eight cy-clones that encircle it. Data from the mission indicates these storms are enduring fea-tures.NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/ASI/INAF/JIRAM Colder Climes
On its 53rd orbit (Feb 18, 2023), Juno began radio occultation experiments to explore the gas giant’s atmospheric temperature structure. With this technique, a radio signal is transmitted from Earth to Juno and back, passing through Jupiter’s atmosphere on both legs of the journey. As the planet’s atmospheric layers bend the radio waves, scientists can precisely measure the effects of this refraction to derive detailed information about the temperature and density of the atmosphere.
So far, Juno has completed 26 radio occultation soundings. Among the most compelling discoveries: the first-ever temperature measurement of Jupiter’s north polar stratospheric cap reveals the region is about 11 degrees Celsius cooler than its surroundings and is encircled by winds exceeding 100 mph (161 kph).
Polar Cyclones
The team’s recent findings also focus on the cyclones that haunt Jupiter’s north. Years of data from the JunoCam visible light imager and JIRAM have allowed Juno scientists to observe the long-term movement of Jupiter’s massive northern polar cyclone and the eight cyclones that encircle it. Unlike hurricanes on Earth, which typically occur in isolation and at lower latitudes, Jupiter’s are confined to the polar region.
By tracking the cyclones’ movements across multiple orbits, the scientists observed that each storm gradually drifts toward the pole due to a process called “beta drift” (the interaction between the Coriolis force and the cyclone’s circular wind pattern). This is similar to how hurricanes on our planet migrate, but Earthly cyclones break up before reaching the pole due to the lack of warm, moist air needed to fuel them, as well as the weakening of the Coriolis force near the poles. What’s more, Jupiter’s cyclones cluster together while approaching the pole, and their motion slows as they begin interacting with neighboring cyclones.
“These competing forces result in the cyclones ‘bouncing’ off one another in a manner reminiscent of springs in a mechanical system,” said Yohai Kaspi, a Juno co-investigator from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. “This interaction not only stabilizes the entire configuration, but also causes the cyclones to oscillate around their central positions, as they slowly drift westward, clockwise, around the pole.”
The new atmospheric model helps explain the motion of cyclones not only on Jupiter, but potentially on other planets, including Earth.
“One of the great things about Juno is its orbit is ever-changing, which means we get a new vantage point each time as we perform a science flyby,” said Bolton. “In the extended mission, that means we’re continuing to go where no spacecraft has gone before, including spending more time in the strongest planetary radiation belts in the solar system. It’s a little scary, but we’ve built Juno like a tank and are learning more about this intense environment each time we go through it.”
More About Juno
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of Caltech in Pasadena, California, manages the Juno mission for the principal investigator, Scott Bolton, of the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. Juno is part of NASA’s New Frontiers Program, which is managed at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, for the agency’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The Italian Space Agency funded the Jovian InfraRed Auroral Mapper. Lockheed Martin Space in Denver built and operates the spacecraft. Various other institutions around the U.S. provided several of the other scientific instruments on Juno.
More information about Juno is at: https://www.nasa.gov/juno
News Media Contacts
DC Agle
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Karen Fox / Molly Wasser
NASA Headquarters, Washington
202-358-1600
karen.c.fox@nasa.gov / molly.l.wasser@nasa.gov
Deb Schmid
Southwest Research Institute, San Antonio
210-522-2254
dschmid@swri.org
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Last Updated Apr 29, 2025 Related Terms
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Explore This Section Webb News Latest News Latest Images Blog (offsite) Awards X (offsite – login reqd) Instagram (offsite – login reqd) Facebook (offsite- login reqd) Youtube (offsite) Overview About Who is James Webb? Fact Sheet Impacts+Benefits FAQ Science Overview and Goals Early Universe Galaxies Over Time Star Lifecycle Other Worlds Observatory Overview Launch Deployment Orbit Mirrors Sunshield Instrument: NIRCam Instrument: MIRI Instrument: NIRSpec Instrument: FGS/NIRISS Optical Telescope Element Backplane Spacecraft Bus Instrument Module Multimedia About Webb Images Images Videos What is Webb Observing? 3d Webb in 3d Solar System Podcasts Webb Image Sonifications Team International Team People Of Webb More For the Media For Scientists For Educators For Fun/Learning 5 Min Read With NASA’s Webb, Dying Star’s Energetic Display Comes Into Full Focus
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has taken the most detailed image of planetary nebula NGC 1514 to date thanks to its unique mid-infrared observations. Webb shows its rings as intricate clumps of dust. It’s also easier to see holes punched through the bright pink central region. Credits:
NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Michael Ressler (NASA-JPL), Dave Jones (IAC) Gas and dust ejected by a dying star at the heart of NGC 1514 came into complete focus thanks to mid-infrared data from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. Its rings, which are only detected in infrared light, now look like “fuzzy” clumps arranged in tangled patterns, and a network of clearer holes close to the central stars shows where faster material punched through.
“Before Webb, we weren’t able to detect most of this material, let alone observe it so clearly,” said Mike Ressler, a researcher and project scientist for Webb’s MIRI (Mid-Infrared Instrument) at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in southern California. He discovered the rings around NGC 1514 in 2010 when he examined the image from NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE). “With MIRI’s data, we can now comprehensively examine the turbulent nature of this nebula,” he said.
This scene has been forming for at least 4,000 years — and will continue to change over many more millennia. At the center are two stars that appear as one in Webb’s observation, and are set off with brilliant diffraction spikes. The stars follow a tight, elongated nine-year orbit and are draped in an arc of dust represented in orange.
One of these stars, which used to be several times more massive than our Sun, took the lead role in producing this scene. “As it evolved, it puffed up, throwing off layers of gas and dust in in a very slow, dense stellar wind,” said David Jones, a senior scientist at the Institute of Astrophysics on the Canary Islands, who proved there is a binary star system at the center in 2017.
Once the star’s outer layers were expelled, only its hot, compact core remained. As a white dwarf star, its winds both sped up and weakened, which might have swept up material into thin shells.
Image A: Planetary Nebula NGC 1514 (MIRI Image)
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has taken the most detailed image of planetary nebula NGC 1514 to date thanks to its unique mid-infrared observations. Webb shows its rings as intricate clumps of dust. It’s also easier to see holes punched through the bright pink central region. NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Michael Ressler (NASA-JPL), Dave Jones (IAC) Image B: Planetary Nebula NGC 1514 (WISE and Webb Images Side by Side)
Two infrared views of NGC 1514. At left is an observation from NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE). At right is a more refined image from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, NASA-JPL, Caltech, UCLA, Michael Ressler (NASA-JPL), Dave Jones (IAC) Its Hourglass Shape
Webb’s observations show the nebula is tilted at a 60-degree angle, which makes it look like a can is being poured, but it’s far more likely that NGC 1514 takes the shape of an hourglass with the ends lopped off. Look for hints of its pinched waist near top left and bottom right, where the dust is orange and drifts into shallow V-shapes.
What might explain these contours? “When this star was at its peak of losing material, the companion could have gotten very, very close,” Jones said. “That interaction can lead to shapes that you wouldn’t expect. Instead of producing a sphere, this interaction might have formed these rings.”
Though the outline of NGC 1514 is clearest, the hourglass also has “sides” that are part of its three-dimensional shape. Look for the dim, semi-transparent orange clouds between its rings that give the nebula body.
A Network of Dappled Structures
The nebula’s two rings are unevenly illuminated in Webb’s observations, appearing more diffuse at bottom left and top right. They also look fuzzy, or textured. “We think the rings are primarily made up of very small dust grains,” Ressler said. “When those grains are hit by ultraviolet light from the white dwarf star, they heat up ever so slightly, which we think makes them just warm enough to be detected by Webb in mid-infrared light.”
In addition to dust, the telescope also revealed oxygen in its clumpy pink center, particularly at the edges of the bubbles or holes.
NGC 1514 is also notable for what is absent. Carbon and more complex versions of it, smoke-like material known as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, are common in planetary nebulae (expanding shells of glowing gas expelled by stars late in their lives). Neither were detected in NGC 1514. More complex molecules might not have had time to form due to the orbit of the two central stars, which mixed up the ejected material. A simpler composition also means that the light from both stars reaches much farther, which is why we see the faint, cloud-like rings.
What about the bright blue star to the lower left with slightly smaller diffraction spikes than the central stars? It’s not part of this nebula. In fact, this star lies closer to us.
This planetary nebula has been studied by astronomers since the late 1700s. Astronomer William Herschel noted in 1790 that NGC 1514 was the first deep sky object to appear genuinely cloudy — he could not resolve what he saw into individual stars within a cluster, like other objects he cataloged. With Webb, our view is considerably clearer.
NGC 1514 lies in the Taurus constellation approximately 1,500 light-years from Earth.
The James Webb Space Telescope is the world’s premier space science observatory. Webb will solve mysteries in our solar system, look beyond to distant worlds around other stars, and probe the mysterious structures and origins of our universe and our place in it. Webb is an international program led by NASA with its partners, ESA (European Space Agency) and the Canadian Space Agency.
To learn more about Webb, visit: https://science.nasa.gov/webb
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NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
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Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, Md.
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Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, Md.
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By USH
Io, Jupiter’s famous volcanic moon, is already the most volcanically active place in the solar system. But between Halloween and Christmas of 2024, something happened that was extreme, even by Io’s standards.
Its south pole erupted in a way astronomers weren’t even sure was possible. A super volcano exploded with such force that it was visible from space as a massive dark blotch in the atmosphere. In infrared, the eruption was so intense that it saturated scientific sensors.
How Big Was This Eruption? To grasp the scale, imagine Io were the size of Earth. This super volcano would cover an area larger than Texas, larger than Egypt. The aftermath would trigger a global volcanic winter lasting years, possibly decades.
The eruption unleashed energy equivalent to 260 Yellowstone's and its lava field could bury everything from New York to Kansas under 10 feet of molten rock or stretch from the Gulf of Mexico to the Great Lakes. Every minute, the eruption released energy equal to 1.5 million Hiroshima bombs.
Just think about this: Earth’s most devastating volcanic event, the Siberian Traps eruption, lasted for a million years and led to one of the worst mass extinctions in history. Io’s super volcano, at its current rate, would surpass that in just 800 years. Over a million years, it could spew out the equivalent of 1% of Earth’s entire mantle. If the volume of this eruption were spread evenly across Earth, our planet’s landscape would be completely transformed in a matter of days.
Even in a solar system filled with astonishing phenomena, Io continues to shock and surprise us.
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By NASA
5 min read
Atomic Layer Processing Coating Techniques Enable Missions to See Further into the Ultraviolet
Astrophysics observations at ultraviolet (UV) wavelengths often probe the most dynamic aspects of the universe. However, the high energy of ultraviolet photons means that their interaction with the materials that make up an observing instrument are less efficient, resulting in low overall throughput. New approaches in the development of thin film coatings are addressing this shortcoming by engineering the coatings of instrument structures at the atomic scale.
Researchers at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) are employing atomic layer deposition (ALD) and atomic layer etching (ALE) to enable new coating technologies for instruments measuring ultraviolet light. Conventional optical coatings largely rely on physical vapor deposition (PVD) methods like evaporation, where the coating layer is formed by vaporizing the source material and then condensing it onto the intended substrate. In contrast, ALD and ALE rely on a cyclic series of self-limiting chemical reactions that result in the deposition (or removal) of material one atomic layer at a time. This self-limiting characteristic results in a coating or etchings that are conformal over arbitrary shapes with precisely controlled layer thickness determined by the number of ALD or ALE cycles performed.
The ALD and ALE techniques are common in the semiconductor industry where they are used to fabricate high-performance transistors. Their use as an optical coating method is less common, particularly at ultraviolet wavelengths where the choice of optical coating material is largely restricted to metal fluorides instead of more common metal oxides, due to the larger optical band energy of fluoride materials, which minimizes absorption losses in the coatings. Using an approach based on co-reaction with hydrogen fluoride, the team at JPL has developed a variety of fluoride-based ALD and ALE processes.
(left) The Supernova remnants and Proxies for ReIonization Testbed Experiment (SPRITE) CubeSat primary mirror inside the ALD coating facility at JPL, the mirror is 18 cm on the long and is the largest optic coated in this chamber to-date. (right) Flight optic coating inside JPL ALD chamber for Pioneers Aspera Mission. Like SPRITE, the Aspera coating combines a lithium fluoride process developed at NASA GSFC with thin ALD encapsulation of magnesium fluoride at JPL. Image Credit: NASA-JPL In addition to these metal-fluoride materials, layers of aluminum are often used to construct structures like reflective mirrors and bandpass filters for instruments operating in the UV. Although aluminum has high intrinsic UV reflectance, it also readily forms a surface oxide that strongly absorbs UV light. The role of the metal fluoride coating is then to protect the aluminum surface from oxidation while maintaining enough transparency to create a mirror with high reflectance.
The use of ALD in this context has initially been pursued in the development of telescope optics for two SmallSat astrophysics missions that will operate in the UV: the Supernova remnants and Proxies for ReIonization Testbed Experiment (SPRITE) CubeSat mission led by Brian Fleming at the University of Colorado Boulder, and the Aspera mission led by Carlos Vargas at the University of Arizona. The mirrors for SPRITE and Aspera have reflective coatings that utilize aluminum protected by lithium fluoride using a novel PVD processes developed at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, and an additional very thin top coating of magnesium fluoride deposited via ALD.
Team member John Hennessy prepares to load a sample wafer in the ALD coating chamber at JPL. Image Credit: NASA JPL The use of lithium fluoride enables SPRITE and Aspera to “see” further into the UV than other missions like NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, which uses only magnesium fluoride to protect its aluminum mirror surfaces. However, a drawback of lithium fluoride is its sensitivity to moisture, which in some cases can cause the performance of these mirror coatings to degrade on the ground prior to launch. To circumvent this issue, very thin layers (~1.5 nanometers) of magnesium fluoride were deposited by ALD on top of the lithium fluoride on the SPRITE and Aspera mirrors. The magnesium fluoride layers are thin enough to not strongly impact the performance of the mirror at the shortest wavelengths, but thick enough to enhance the stability against humidity during ground phases of the missions. Similar approaches are being considered for the mirror coatings of the future NASA flagship Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO).
Multilayer structures of aluminum and metal fluorides can also function as bandpass filters (filters that allow only signals within a selected range of wavelengths to pass through to be recorded) in the UV. Here, ALD is an attractive option due to the inherent repeatability and precise thickness control of the process. There is currently no suitable ALD process to deposit aluminum, and so additional work by the JPL team has explored the development of a custom vacuum coating chamber that combines the PVD aluminum and ALD fluoride processes described above. This system has been used to develop UV bandpass filters that can be deposited directly onto imaging sensors like silicon (Si) CCDs. These coatings can enable such sensors to operate with high UV efficiency, but low sensitivity to longer wavelength visible photons that would otherwise add background noise to the UV observations.
Structures composed of multilayer aluminum and metal fluoride coatings have recently been delivered as part of a UV camera to the Star-Planet Activity Research CubeSat (SPARCS) mission led by Evgenya Shkolnik at Arizona State University. The JPL-developed camera incorporates a delta-doped Si CCD with the ALD/PVD filter coating on the far ultraviolet channel, yielding a sensor with high efficiency in a band centered near 160 nm with low response to out-of-band light.
A prototype of a back-illuminated CCD incorporating a multi-layer metal-dielectric bandpass filter coating deposited by a combination of thermal evaporation and ALD. This coating combined with JPL back surface passivation approaches enable the Si CCD to operate with high UV efficiency while rejecting longer wavelength light. Image credit: NASA JPL Next, the JPL team that developed these coating processes plans to focus on implementing a similar bandpass filter on an array of larger-format Si Complementary Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor (CMOS) sensors for the recently selected NASA Medium-Class Explorer (MIDEX) UltraViolet EXplorer (UVEX) mission led by Fiona Harrison at the California Institute of Technology, which is targeted to launch in the early 2030s.
For additional details, see the entry for this project on NASA TechPort
Project Lead: Dr. John Hennessy, Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL)
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Last Updated Mar 18, 2025 Related Terms
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