The green lightning bolt was seen inside one of the many vortices that cluster near Jupiter's north pole.
Scientists are still trying to understand many facets of Jupiter, the largest planet in our solar system, including its massive storms and how lightning and lightning-like events occur on the gas giant.
The Juno spacecraft, which first arrived to observe Jupiter and its moons in 2016, captured the event during its 31st close flyby of the gas giant on December 30, 2020. The mission was about 19,900 miles above the cloud tops when it took the image. The raw images of Jupiter and its moons taken by JunoCam are posted online and available for anyone to process.
"As well as continuously changing our orbit to allow new perspectives of Jupiter and flying low over the nightside of the planet, the spacecraft will also be threading the needle between some of Jupiter's rings to learn more about their origin and composition," said Matthew Johnson, acting project manager for the Juno mission at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, in a statement.
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