Wait for me! In 2011, NASA's robotic mission Juno launched for Jupiter from Cape Canaveral, Florida, USA. Last week, Juno reached Jupiter and fired internal rockets to become only the second spacecraft to orbit our Solar System's largest planet. Juno, tasked with studying the jovian giant over the next two years, is in a highly elliptical orbit that will next bringing it near Jupiter's cloud tops in late August. Of course, the three-year-old pictured was not able to catch up to the launching rocket. Today, however, five years later, he is eight-years-old and still chasing rockets -- in that now he wants to be an astronaut.

The polar region is filled with a variety of discrete atmospheric features. Some of these are ovals, but the larger and brighter features have a "pinwheel" shape reminiscent of the shape of terrestrial hurricanes. Tracking the motion and evolution of these features across multiple orbits will provide clues about the dynamics of the Jovian atmosphere.

Today Juno flies again, its fifth flyby of the gas giant. Juno will approach to within 4,400 km of Jupiter’s cloud tops, and will travel at a speed of 207,600 km/h. During this time of closest approach, called a perijove, all of Juno’s eight science instruments will be active, along with the JunoCam.

Oval storms dot the cloudscape. Approaching the pole, the organized turbulence of Jupiter’s belts and zones transitions into clusters of unorganized filamentary structures, streams of air that resemble giant tangled strings. The image was taken on Dec. 11, 2016 . . . from an altitude of about 32,400 miles (52,200 kilometers) above the planet’s cloud tops.

The white clouds are so high in Jupiter's atmosphere that they're very cold, and the material they shed is therefore almost certainly frozen, Juno team members said.

"It's snowing on Jupiter, and we're seeing how it works," Juno principal investigator Scott Bolton, of the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, said during a news conference Thursday (May 25). "It's probably mostly ammonia ice, but there may be water ice mixed into it, so it's not exactly like the snow that we have [on Earth]," Bolton added. "And I was using my imagination when I said it was snowing there — it could be hail."

This image was processed to enhance color differences, showing the amazing variety in Jupiter’s stormy atmosphere. The result is a surreal world of vibrant color, clarity and contrast. Four of the white oval storms known as the “String of Pearls” are visible near the top of the image. Interestingly, one orange-colored storm can be seen at the belt-zone boundary, while other storms are more of a cream color. 

The tumultuous Great Red Spot is fading from Juno's view while the dynamic bands of the southern region of Jupiter come into focus. North is to the left of the image, and south is on the right.