Close-up of a storm on Jupiter from the Juno spacecraft

© NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/Gerald Eichstadt/Sean Dora

World Space Week begins. From Sputnik to extraterrestrial storms

NASA’s solar-powered Juno probe took this photo of a massive storm near Jupiter’s north pole. Juno’s been collecting data and taking incredible photos of Jupiter since 2016, showing us how active the atmosphere on the largest planet in our solar system is. We share this photo to celebrate the start of World Space Week today. You may ask yourself, why does World Space Week begin on a Thursday? That’s because October 4 is the day in 1957 that the Soviet Union successfully launched Sputnik 1 into a low orbit around the Earth, kicking off the Space Race. But the decade-long contest for dominance in space exploration has since given way to more united, global efforts to explore our universe, a sentiment summed up nicely by this year’s Space Week theme: ‘Space unites us all.’