NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/Kevin M. Gill (CC BY 2.0)
An illustration of NASA's Juno probe flying over Jupiter's Great Red Spot superstorm.
Juno, a tennis-court-size NASA probe at Jupiter, recently sent scientists a new batch of data, and the photos it included are even more stunning than the last set.
NASA launched Juno toward Jupiter in August 2011, and the probe arrived in July 2016. Every 53.5 days since then, Juno performs an orbital maneuver called a perijove.
During a perijove, the probe dives over the north pole, screams past the Jovian cloud tops at 130,000 mph, and exits at the south pole. This highly elliptical loop helps protect the spacecraft's electronics from Jupiter's powerful radiation fields while also allowing it to make unprecedented observations.
The $1-billion mission successfully pulled off its 13th perijove on May 24 and beamed its trove of data back to Earth. Fans of the mission like graphic artist Seán Doran and NASA software engineer Kevin M. Gill have since processed the raw image files into colorful works of art.
Here are some of the most jaw-dropping pictures from Juno's latest trip around Jupiter.