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It’s the big one as you have never seen it before. NASA’s Juno probe has sent back the first-ever images of Jupiter’s north pole, showing storms raging above the planet’s surface.

The images were captured during Juno’s first fly-by of the planet on 27 August when it was about 4200 kilometres above Jupiter’s clouds. The probe downloaded 6 megabytes of data during the six-hour fly-by.

“First glimpse of Jupiter’s north pole, and it looks like nothing we have seen or imagined before,” Scott Bolton, principal investigator of Juno, said in a statement. Shadows cast by the clouds indicate that they are at a higher altitude than the other atmospheric features, said Bolton, who is based at the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio.

Juno’s other science instruments are also collecting new data – this time on the planet’s auroras. The Radio/Plasma Wave Experiment (Waves) picked up the radio waves they generated, which NASA then shifted into the audio range

And the Jovian Infrared Auroral Mapper (JIRAM) managed to capture images of the planet’s southern aurora in infrared (below).

Juno entered orbit on 4 July and is orbiting Jupiter’s poles, rather than around the equator, to protect it from the planet’s powerful belts of radiation.