 Hey, this is Dr. Thomas See with Science in Seconds and we're celebrating an anniversary today It's the ninth anniversary of the launch of Juneau and with me here to talk about not only Juneau but three new publications that just came out are Scott Bolton the PI of Juneau at Southwest and Heidi Becker at JPL who's the lead of the Radiation Monitoring Group Scott, what's new? So we've got three new papers coming out and they deal with the topics of lightning We found some lightning really high up much higher than we expected And we've also developed a theory that shows that hail is pretty common from violent thunderstorms at Jupiter and it's carrying ammonia and water down deep into the atmosphere and these are really exciting results because most of the weather and meteorology on Jupiter is driven by ammonia and water and on earth it's all driven by water, but on Jupiter it's a little bit different. Ammonia starts playing a really important role So Heidi, talk to us about these hail balls like talk to us. How should we imagine them? Well, they're they're very large. They're at least as large as a softball maybe quite a bit larger than that and On the inside they're made from a pretty unusual ammonia water solution It's kind of like a Windex snow cone if you can imagine that Covered in a hard water ice crust that gets thicker and thicker and thicker the longer It's tumbled in the atmosphere by Jupiter's violent storms until they get so heavy that they fall deep into the atmosphere and carry the ammonia down deep So Scott one of the most amazing views of course are these images that so many of our citizen scientists work down Which is this beautiful highly structured Atmosphere really off of this planet and I'd like to understand like is this structure kind of furthering or is it on the inside? Is it more like you know Uniform or you know, how should I think about these kind of weather? Observations here. So that's one of Juno's discoveries is we're seeing that this stuff goes down pretty deep You know before Juno we thought that all those beautiful clouds and zones and belts and the winds on Juno We're on Jupiter. We're just skin deep but in fact they go down quite deep and And so what you're seeing at the top cloud layer is really the very top part of a storm that has really deep roots and is Violent thunderstorms with lightning and strong winds That's that's amazing. So Heidi, how did you actually discover this? What's the instruments you used for this? Well, we actually used our our engineering star camera to do it It's there to help us navigate Juno and tell us where we're pointing when we took our data But it's incredibly sensitive. It can see very dim things and because Juno flies so close to the cloud tops We were able to see lightning flashes that were much smaller than any prior mission had ever been able to see So honey, what's the most exciting part of this discovery for you personally? Well for me personally, it's it's the realization that lightning on Jupiter isn't happening the same way It happens like it does on earth. That's what everybody thought Looking at images from back to Voyager one everybody thought it's made in the deep water cloud where thunderstorms are like they are at earth but These altitudes where we're seeing them happening these small lightning flashes It's happening where you can't have liquid water But there's something special in Jupiter, which is ammonia and that acts as an antifreeze that Allows ice water ice to melt at those high altitudes and create the conditions for lightnings It's very exotic and very different than what we have here on earth and that's what's most exciting to me Scott Heidi, this is just an amazing discovery and I just want to congratulate Both you and the entire team for this amazing work during the last nine years and also for the years to come as we Observe the amazing hurricane on the east coast that I just went over our house here Of course, it's just amazing to think that out there in the solitude of space where Juno makes observations There is violent letter of type that we've never observed here And that's exactly why we do these amazing missions is to learn about nature itself in other places So thanks to you and congrats