Jupiter is the largest planet in the solar system — so massive, in fact, that it doesn't technically orbit the sun.
Source: Business Insider
The world is about 318 times as massive and 1,321 times as voluminous as Earth. Few spacecraft have ever visited it.
Source: Universe Today
Juno was the first probe to fly above and below Jupiter, photograph the planet's poles, and begin to unravel their mysteries.
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The spacecraft soon began high-speed flybys of Jupiter, called perijoves. During each perijove, Juno takes astounding image sequences while it zooms over the north pole...
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...Shoots past the planet's equator at about 130,000 mph, and then exits over the south pole.
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"Jupiter is in constant flux so it's always a surprise to see what is going on in those cloudscapes," Seán Doran, a graphic artist and a prolific processor of JunoCam images, previously told Business Insider.
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Some users boost the saturation and contrast to pull out exquisite details of cloud bands.
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But Jupiter's gargantuan Jovian storms and the wild patterns they leave in the clouds stand out with little help.
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Photos of the Great Red Spot have been a favorite among Juno fans. The storm could easily swallow Earth, and the probe photographed it twice — once in July 2017 and again in April 2018.
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This stunning image is actually a blend of several photos captured by Juno. The image may be one of the last we get of the Spot — although the storm has lasted for centuries, it could vanish within a few decades.
Lesser-known storm cells, many of which don't have evocative names because they're so short-lived, also swirl about Jupiter.
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Scientists who study Jupiter call this nearly Earth-size storm "anticyclonic white oval WS-4."
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Many storms in Jupiter form bands and patterns that are as hallucinogenic as they are beautiful.
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Interpretive color processing of JunoCam data sometimes makes its storms take on striking blue colors.
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Other bands create powerful chevrons that punch through cloud layers. The storm at the center of this image is many times larger than a hurricane on Earth.
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NASA described this image showing a mess of storms as a "mind-bending, color-enhanced view of the planet’s tumultuous atmosphere" in a January 2018 release.
Sources: NASA, Business Insider
The poles are regions that planetary scientists had only dreamed of seeing until a few years ago, thanks to Juno's daredevil orbits.
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This oddly symmetrical image of Jupiter's north pole was made using a combination of photos from Juno's first, third, fourth, and fifth perijoves. It also uses images from the probe's aurora-mapping instrument, called JIRAM.
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JIRAM scans Jupiter for temperature variations and electrical activity that are invisible to JunoCam.
Sources: Business Insider, NASAJuno/YouTube
Researchers have used the data to model the planet's storm-choked north pole in 3D.
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Juno has completed 12 of the 14 total orbits scheduled for its first mission — the final two will happen on May 24 and July 16. But even with an extension and a new mission, the probe won't last forever.
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NASA will eventually plunge Juno into the clouds of Jupiter to destroy it, thereby eliminating the possibility that it could crash into one of the planet's icy, ocean-hiding moons.
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It's important to avoid contaminating the subsurface oceans of Europa, Ganymede, and the other moons with bacteria from Earth — as well as any alien life that may exist beneath the ice.
Source: Business Insider