20160903 - jupiter northpole

Juno reveals that Jupiter's north pole is 'like nothing we have seen or imagined'

Seen from a different angle, Jupiter looks like a whole new world.
After flying within about 2,500 miles of the planet’s cloud tops on Aug. 27, NASA’s Juno spacecraft has sent home unprecedented images of Jupiter’s north pole, revealing a stormy fluid-scape that looks as if it could be on a totally different gas giant.
“The north pole of Jupiter really doesn’t look a whole lot like the rest of the planet,” Steve Levin, Juno’s project scientist at Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said in an interview.

Last week’s flyby was the spacecraft’s first such pass with all its science instruments turned on, as well as the closest of the 36 orbital flybys that the spacecraft is set to make during its mission. While Jupiter is the largest planet in the solar system by far, there’s surprisingly little known about its polar regions — and so Juno’s close-up camera work was bound to deliver a few surprises.
As the JunoCam imager revealed, Jupiter’s north pole is bluer than better-known areas of the planet, which are often dominated by red, orange and brown hues. Gone are those iconic bands of light and dark; in their place are a whole lot of storms.
Even the storms appear different at the poles, Levin added: they look smaller and more clustered, unlike the squalls in other parts of Jupiter that swirl at the boundaries between the planet’s stripes of moving fluid. (Jupiter’s Great Red Spot is a prime example.)
“It looks like nothing we have seen or imagined before,” Scott Bolton, Juno’s principal investigator at the Southwest Research Institute, said in a statement.

 http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-jupiter-north-pole-20160902-snap-story.html