Lightning, ammonia clouds, volcanic moons – there’s enough to see at Jupiter that you’d think a long stay was called for, not a flying visit. However a flying visit was all that was on the cards for NASA’s New Horizons probe as it used the planet’s gravity to throw itself off towards its ultimate destination, Pluto and ithe icy wastes beyond. Still, the brief encounter was worth it, according to those involved.

“The Jupiter encounter was successful beyond our wildest dreams,” said Alan Stern, the probe’s principal investigator, and NASA’s chief scientist (press release). “Not only did it prove out our spacecraft and put it on course to reach Pluto in 2015, it was a chance for us to take sophisticated instruments to places in the Jovian system where other spacecraft couldn’t go, and to return important data that adds tremendously to our understanding of the solar system’s largest planet and its moons, rings and atmosphere.”

NASA says that a “combination of trajectory, timing and technology” allowed the probe to peek into regions not before seen. Stern and his team presented results of data from the fly by at an American Astronomical Society meeting in Orlando earlier this week. A whole host of papers should appear tomorrow in Science.

AFP is most impressed by the lightning, noting that some strikes were ten times more powerful than anything recorded on Earth. National Geographic reports on the fact that ‘moonlets’ scientists were expecting to find whizzing round in Jupiter’s rings were mysteriously absent. They did however find in the rings two lumps of ‘moon-like’ material, whatever that is (BBC). As Wired notes, some of the results from this fly by were released earlier this year, and reported at the time in Nature. Pretty pictures galore are on the New Horizons picture gallery.

UPDATE

Nature’s coverage of this is now online too, noting that plans to study Jupiter’s “famously tempestuous weather” were kyboshed by good weather. “We get there, and we were faked out. It was completely clear,” says Kevin Baines, a planetary scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California

Image: Jupiter-Io Montage / NASA