UVS stands for Ultra-Violet Spectrograph.
It's an instrument that looks at ultraviolet light
light that you can't see with your eyes,
it's too short a wavelength
but it also breaks that light up into different colors,
much like a prism would break up white light into a rainbow.
It has two components to it, actually.
One is the sensor which is sort of a telescope,
plus a spectrograph, side by side.
And all the electronics, except for what need to be right at the sensor,
are put in another box which is deep inside a vault,
which on Juno, protects all the sensitive electronics from the radiation at Jupiter.
Jupiter has some similarity to Earth.
The Earth has northern lights -- auroras, and they're spectacular to watch.
Jupiter's auroras are like a thousand times bigger.
So the auroral oval on Jupiter is bigger than the entire Earth
and much, much, more powerful.
And it's always on.
But it's much easier to look at it
in ultraviolet wavelengths 'cause we can see it on the day side as well.
When we see light from those different colors and the UV
they tell us different hinges about Jupiter's upper atmosphere
and the particles that are causing the auroras to happen.
We'll be able to contrast how auroras work at Earth
with how they work at Jupiter.
And there are many differences we already know
but there's a lot of things we've never been able to see at Jupiter
that we can see with Juno once we get there.