NASA's $1 billion Jupiter probe just beamed back mesmerizing new photos of the gas giant
Juno makes an elliptical orbit around Jupiter. It's a compromise between getting unprecedented new data and staying out of the planet's intense radiation field, which can damage sensitive electronics.
During a perijove, the Juno probe dives over Jupiter's north pole, screams past the Jovian cloud tops at 130,000 mph, and exits at the south pole.
While the probe is close to Jupiter, Juno records the planet with radar systems, radiation detectors, magnetic and gravitational field recorders, and more.
Juno was the first spacecraft to fly above and below Jupiter, photograph the planet's poles, and begin to unravel their mysteries. Color processing often gives the storms near the poles a blue hue.
Researchers have used data collected by Juno to model Jupiter’s storm-choked north pole in 3D.
Juno can't get a picture of the entire planet at once. The spacecraft is roughly 66 feet long, while Jupiter is more than 88,840 miles wide at its middle. Jupiter is about 1,321 times as voluminous as Earth.
Björn Jónsson, an Icelandic computer scientist, recently stitched together over 100 images from the Juno mission and the Cassini mission to Saturn to create this full photographic map of Jupiter.
Among Juno fans, photos of the Great Red Spot have been a favorite, since the storm could easily swallow Earth. The probe didn’t photograph that area during the most recent flyby, though — the last new images of the spot were captured in April 2018.
But Jupiter has plenty of other remarkable cloudscapes and storms swirling. This swath of high-altitude clouds is located in the planet's northern hemisphere.
Jupiter's storms and clouds form patterns that can look as trippy as they are beautiful. Seán Doran, a graphic artist who is one of the most prolific processors of JunoCam data, created this image. "Planet of Screaming Skulls," he called it on Twitter.
Doran also made this mysterious portrait of the planet, in which you can see the twinkle of myriad stars in the background.
Although Juno will continue to orbit Jupiter through at least July 2021, NASA ultimately plans to destroy the robot by plunging it into Jupiter's clouds.
The rationale for that dramatic ending is similar to the one behind the Cassini probe's demise at Saturn: Jupiter's icy moon Europa may be habitable to alien life, so deliberately destroying Juno will prevent it from crashing into that moon and contaminating whatever's there.
For the next three years, though, we'll continue to get new batches of incredible images from the farthest solar-powered spacecraft ever launched from Earth.
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