Ignoring all the fascinating stuff about Jupiter, let me point out this gem: <i>The download of six megabytes of data [...] took one-and-a-half days</i><p>I sometimes like to scare kids by telling them about the time when I surfed the Internet with 14.4 kbit modem, but even that looks incredibly fast compared to the speed of interplanetary data transmission (back then, 6 MiB would have taken me about 2-2.5 hours).<p>(NB that I am not complaining or anything, just pointing out that this is many orders of magnitudes slower than anything one would normally consider a "slow" connection.)
<i>“Saturn has a hexagon at the north pole,” said Bolton. “There is nothing on Jupiter that anywhere near resembles that. The largest planet in our solar system is truly unique. We have 36 more flybys to study just how unique it really is.”</i><p>This is the first I've heard of Saturn's hexagon, very interesting: <a href="http://www.space.com/30608-mysterious-saturn-hexagon-explained.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.space.com/30608-mysterious-saturn-hexagon-explain...</a>
Absolutely breathtaking.<p>Interesting that they phrase the headline almost as if to imply uniqueness. My impression was that Saturn's hexagon was the unique situation (occurring, hypothetically, only under very specific conditions). Is it expected then that Uranus and Neptune's poles will look different still?
I wonder if the clouds don't separate into bands as much at those latitudes because the velocity (due to the planet's rotation) is lower closer to the poles.
the second video says:<p>> the infrared data captured a faint aurora<p>when talking about aurora strength which variable is predominant: the magnetosphere, the atmosphere, or amount of solar radiation?<p>also, can anyone speak to the reason for the noisy instrument detecting those 3.45 micron wavelengths? why is the bottom edge so active?
"The download of six megabytes of data collected during the six-hour transit, from above Jupiter’s north pole to below its south pole, took one-and-a-half days."<p>...surely that's a typo and they mean gigabytes?
> <i>“Saturn has a hexagon at the north pole,” said Bolton. “There is nothing on Jupiter that anywhere near resembles that. The largest planet in our solar system is truly unique. We have 36 more flybys to study just how unique it really is.”</i><p>Eh? Jupiter is 'truly unique' because it <i>doesn't</i> have an extremely puzzling feature that only one other planet is known to have?