Juno spacecraft spots meteor fireball lighting up Jupiter’s skies

By Will Gater

NASA’s Juno probe, which is at present circling Jupiter, has noticed what seems to be the fiery blast of a meteoroid plunging into the planet.

The serendipitous discovery was made by one of many spacecraft’s spectrometers that captures ultraviolet views of the planet. The instrument was observing the ultraviolet glow from aurorae dancing in Jupiter’s upper atmosphere when it detected a strong burst of sunshine that appeared within the large world’s night-time skies in April final yr.

Precise observations of such explosive occasions are uncommon, and solely a handful of …