A mission NASA might kill is still returning fascinating science from Jupiter

NASA's Juno spacecraft has detected lightning storms on Jupiter that are at least 100 times more powerful than Earth's, based on data analyzed from 2021 and 2022 and published March 20 in AGU Advances. The mission continues to operate and return science after completing its original five-year campaign, but its future is in jeopardy due to budget constraints—the Trump administration has requested "closeout" plans from Juno and more than a dozen other robotic missions as part of a proposed near-50 percent cut to NASA's science budget. NASA has not yet decided whether to approve another operational extension for Juno, leaving the mission's continuation uncertain amid the administration's fiscal pressure on space science programs.