Small, frequent lightning storms zip across Jupiter’s cloud tops. NASA’s Juno spacecraft spotted the flashes for the first time, scientists report August 5 in Nature.
“It’s a very exotic thing that doesn’t exist on Earth,” says physicist Heidi Becker of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.
Previous spacecraft have revealed high-energy “superbolts” on Jupiter. That lightning originates 50 to 65 kilometers below Jupiter’s cloud tops, where liquid water droplets form. Scientists think superbolts form like lightning on Earth does: Colliding ice crystals and water droplets charge each other up, then stretch the charge between them when they separate (SN: 6/25/20).
Juno, which arrived at Jupiter in 2016, got much closer to the giant planet’s cloud tops than previous missions. Becker and her team turned the spacecraft’s navigation camera — which normally observes stars to track Juno’s position — on Jupiter’s nightside in February 2018. To the team’s surprise, the clouds crackled with electricity.
Newly observed lightning showed up as bright dots (indicated with arrows) on Jupiter’s nightside, seen in this composite image from two of Juno’s cameras. The insets are pixelated representations of the events’ brightness (yellow is more bright; blue is less bright).H.N. Becker et al/Nature 2020
Superbolts are up to 100,000 times as strong as these small flashes. But the cloud-top lightning is 10 times as frequent. Strangely, the smaller bolts appeared to come from just 18 kilometers below the cloud tops, where it’s too cold for liquid water to exist alone.
Shallow lightning must have a different origin than the deeper lightning, Becker says. Perhaps ammonia in the upper cloud decks acts as antifreeze, creating droplets of ammonia and water combined. Juno has also seen evidence that violent storms in deeper cloud layers sometimes toss ice crystals high above where they’re normally found. When those crystals collide with the ammonia-water droplets, they may charge up and create lightning, Becker and her colleagues reason.
Similar small lightning storms may happen on other planets, including exoplanets, Becker says (SN: 5/13/16). “Every time you have a new realization, it feeds into new theories that will be developed not only for our solar system but for other solar systems.” More

China’s first Mars rover is taking in the view of its new home. The Zhurong rover touched down on the Red Planet on May 14, and its first images reached Earth on May 19.

Zhurong, named for an ancient Chinese god of fire, has been orbiting the Red Planet since February 10, when China’s Tianwen-1 spacecraft entered Martian orbit. The rover landed in a vast plain called Utopia Planitia — also where NASA’s Viking 2 lander touched down in 1976, although Viking 2’s site was much farther north (SN:  9/11/76).

The orbiter and rover together mark China’s first Mars mission and make China only the second country to successfully land a rover there. China has previously landed two rovers on the moon, named Yutu and Yutu-2, with the Chang’e-3 and Chang’e-4 missions (SN: 1/3/19).

[embedded content]
The Tianwen-1 orbiter captured a video of the lander and rover separating from the orbiter before plunging into the Martian atmosphere.

Unlike NASA’s Perseverance rover, which landed on Mars in February and beamed photos back almost immediately (SN: 2/17/21), Zhurong took a few days to send its first glimpses of the Martian surface back to Earth. That’s because the rover had to wait for the Tianwen-1 orbiter to move into a lower orbit to allow it to relay more data between Mars and Earth.

This image was taken with Zhurong’s rear navigation camera. It shows the rover’s solar panels and antenna.CNSA

The first images are from Zhurong’s hazard avoidance and navigation cameras. For now, the rover is still perched atop its landing platform. After several days looking around and checking out its instruments, Zhurong will roll down the lander’s ramps and onto the Martian soil, possibly on May 21 or 22, according to a report from China’s state-run Xinhua news agency after the landing.

Zhurong will spend at least three months studying the geology at Utopia Planitia and searching for water ice beneath the surface. The rover carries a ground-penetrating radar that can help distinguish between rock and ice beneath the surface, similar to a technique used by the Yutu-2 rover on the moon (SN: 2/26/20).  It also carries an instrument to analyze surface chemistry.

The Tianwen-1 orbiter will remain active for a full Martian year (about 687 Earth days), observing the ground from space with a high-resolution camera. More

McKenzie Prillaman is a science and health journalist based in Washington, DC. She holds a bachelor’s degree in neuroscience from the University of Virginia and a master’s degree in science communication from the University of California, Santa Cruz. She was the spring 2023 intern at Science News. More

Odysseus has exceeded engineers’ expectations during its odyssey on the moon. NASA confirmed that the spindly solar-powered robotic lander, built and operated by the Houston-based private U.S. company Intuitive Machines, has been alive and collecting data since it touched down, and toppled over, on the lunar surface on February 22.

“What a magnificent job that lander did,” said Intuitive Machines CEO Steve Altemus during a NASA news briefing on February 28. “So much data and information and science. It’s just an incredible testament to how robust that little spacecraft is, so we’re really happy with that.”

On February 27, Odysseus’ narrow-field-of-view camera took this image of the lander on the lunar surface. The lander is slightly tipped over.Official Intuitive Machines Photos (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 DEED)

The spacecraft, which carried payloads from universities, industry and NASA, was the first American spacecraft to perform a soft landing on the moon in more than 50 years (SN: 2/22/24). Odysseus, or Odie as it’s nicknamed, is slowly running out of power, and scientists expect to put it into sleep mode February 28, after roughly six days on the lunar surface. They will try to reawaken Odie in about three weeks when the sun hits the lander’s solar panels again.

Much like its namesake, the epic hero from the Greek classic The Odyssey, the spacecraft Odysseus underwent trials and tribulations in its journey. Its autonomous landing system’s laser range finder malfunctioned, causing engineers to scramble for a solution that involved two extra hours in orbit and reconfiguring a couple backup lasers on a NASA payload. After a nail-biting descent, Odysseus’s landing gear caught on the sloped ground or possibly a crevice, breaking the gear and sending the spacecraft gently tipping over on its side. More

Past observations have suggested that there’s water on the moon. New telescope observations conclude that those findings hold water.
Spacecraft have seen evidence of water ice in permanently shadowed craters at the lunar poles (SN: 5/9/16), as well as hints of water molecules on the sunlit surface (SN: 9/23/09). But water sightings in sunlit regions have relied on detection of infrared light at a wavelength that could also be emitted by other hydroxyl compounds, which contain hydrogen and oxygen. 
Now, the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy, or SOFIA, has detected an infrared signal unique to water near the lunar south pole, researchers report online October 26 in Nature Astronomy. “This is the first unambiguous detection of molecular water on the sunlit moon,” says study coauthor Casey Honniball, a lunar scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. “This shows that water is not just in the permanently shadowed regions — that there are other places on the moon that we could potentially find it.”
These observations could inform future missions to the moon that will scout out lunar water as a potential resource for human visitors (SN: 12/16/19).

Sign Up For the Latest from Science News

Headlines and summaries of the latest Science News articles, delivered to your inbox

SOFIA, operated by NASA and the German Aerospace Center, is a 2.5-meter telescope that rides aboard a jumbo jet to get clear views of the sky (SN: 2/17/16). During a flight in August 2018, the telescope detected 6-micrometer infrared light emanating from a region near the moon’s southern Clavius crater. This wavelength of light is generated by the vibrations of sunlight-heated water molecules, but not other compounds containing hydroxyl, which consists of an oxygen atom bound to a hydrogen atom.
“I thought it was really brilliant” to confirm the presence of water on the moon with observations at this wavelength, says Jessica Sunshine, a planetary scientist at the University of Maryland in College Park. Sunshine was involved in past observations that spotted hints of water on the moon, but was not involved in the new study.
Based on the brightness of the observed infrared light, Honniball’s team calculated a water concentration of about 100 to 400 parts per million around the Clavius crater. That’s less than half a liter of water per metric ton of lunar soil. This concentration was about what the researchers expected, based on past spacecraft observations.
These water molecules are not frozen in ice, like the water in permanently shadowed regions of the moon. Nor is it liquid, Sunshine says. “There’s no moon puddles.” Instead, the water molecules are thought to be bound inside some other material on the lunar surface.
“The only way for us to be seeing water on the [sunlit] moon is if it is sheltered from this harsh environment,” Honniball says. These water molecules could be encased in glass forged by micrometeorite impacts, or wedged between soil grains that shield the water from blistering solar radiation.
Water could have formed on the moon itself, from hydrogen ions in the continual outward flow of charged particles from the sun reacting with oxygen on the surface (SN: 10/6/14). Or, if the water is stored in impact glass, it could have been delivered to the moon by micrometeorites. More