© NASAFirst close-up view of Jupiter from Voyager 1.
Juno has almost completed its 3.2 billion km journey to the gas giant, having left Cape Canaveral in August 2011. Scientists were treated to a strange sound as the spacecraft bore down on Jupiter. After being bombarded with particles in the solar system on its approach, the spacecraft faced dramatically less intensity as it neared the planet because of the magnetosphere protecting Jupiter.
"We can actually listen to what it's like to leave the sun and enter Jupiter," Juno's principal investigator Scott Bolton said at a NASA press conference June 30. "Just the sound of it will tell you that it's non-trivial to go into Jupiter."
The sound, which can be heard on the video after about 10 seconds, is actually known as a bow shock. The data was recorded on June 24 when the probe made the crossing.
"The bow shock is analogous to a sonic boom," William Kurth of the University of Iowa in Iowa City, lead co-investigator for the Waves investigation, said in a statement on NASA's website. "The solar wind blows past all the planets at a speed of about a million miles per hour, and where it hits an obstacle, there's all this turbulence."
Comment: Unfortunately Nature may have more say in the fate of the ozone layer than mankind does.
Planetary upheaval: More volcanoes erupted last week than during entire (average) year in 20th century