Science
An illustration of NASA's Juno probe orbiting Jupiter.
The flow of incredible images from the basketball court-sized robot NASA sent to Jupiter just won't stop.The $1 billion Juno spacecraft took five years to reach Jupiter and settle into orbit around the gas giant, which is currently more than 444 million miles from Earth.
Scientists have used Juno's suite of cameras and other instruments to photograph Jupiter's poles for the first time, detect rivers of ammonia, watch 870-mile-wide cyclones swirl across the surface, record mysterious auroras, and probe deep into the planet's thick cloud tops for evidence of a solid core.
Juno swings by Jupiter once every 53.5 days, at speeds approaching 130,000 mph. NASA wanted to increase the frequency of these flybys to every two weeks, but that operation was scrubbed due to some sticky engine valves.
Juno completed its sixth such maneuver, or "perijove," on May 19 while recording a fresh batch of images. NASA provides the raw image data to the public, and a community of amateurs and professionals continues to turn the muted, unprocessed photos into striking color images.
In March we highlighted a few of these photos from Juno's fifth orbit, but below are fresh images from the robot's sixth orbit, along with a few other unbelievable shots from previous flybys that people have recently processed and posted online.