Timing is extraordinarily important in many aspects of astronomy. If an astronomer or their instrument is looking the wrong way at the wrong time, they could miss something spectacular. Alternatively, there are moments when our instruments capture something unexpected in regions of space that we were searching for something else. That is exactly what happened recently when a team of scientists, led by Rohini Giles at the Southwest Research Institute, saw an image of what is likely a meteor impacting Jupiter's atmosphere.

The team collects data from the UVS, one of the instruments on Juno, NASA's mission tasked with studying the largest solar system planet up close. UVS is Juno's ultraviolet spectrograph, which collects data in the ultraviolet spectra from 68-210 nm. Its primary mission is to study Jupiter's atmosphere and watch for its breathtaking auroras.

Recently, when reviewing a batch of images that came in from the sensor, one of Dr. Giles' colleagues noticed a huge spike in brightness in an area outside of the normal auroral zone. As with much other science, this discovery started with someone finding interesting data when they didn't expect to see it.