NASA says that this initial image indicates that Juno has survived its first close encounter with Jupiter without the local radiation degrading its systems.
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This first image shows Jupiter’s Great Red Spot, an ancient, mysterious storm that has started to shrink.
This latest image of Jupiter taken by Juno was transmitted on Sunday where the probe is about 4.3 million kilometers away from the massive planet.
Juno is on a 53.5-day orbit of Jupiter, and right now it’s swinging out and away from the planet’s surface.
NASA has released the first image from their Juno spacecraft after last week’s Jupiter orbital insertion maneuver, and it gives us just a taste of what’s in store from this unbelievable mission.
Juno recently beamed back the first images captured while in orbit around Jupiter. It would also be spectacularly unsafe, as Jupiter’s radiation belts are about a million times stronger than those of Earth. Over the course of its mission, Juno will circle the gas giant 37 times, flying as close as 2,600 miles (4,100 km).
Footage released by NASA last week shows Juno finally approaching the planet and its surrounding moons.
JPL manages the Juno mission for the principal investigator, Scott Bolton, of Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio.
Juno will also study Jupiter’s weather systems, with a view to applying what humans learn to our understanding of the Earth’s own weather.
According to a report in BBC News by Jonathan Amos, “The American space agency’s new Juno mission to Jupiter has returned its first imagery since going into orbit around the gas giant last week”. Rather, the camera was added to the spacecraft’s payload for the purposes of public engagement.
JunoCam, which serves as Juno’s eyes during its mission, is a color, visible-light camera that was created to take remarkable images of the poles and cloud tops of Jupiter.
“JunoCam will continue to take images as we go around in this first orbit”, Candy Hansen, Juno co-investigator from the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Ariz., wrote in Tuesday’s statement.
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The Juno mission was launched in August 2011.
