This Saturday at 5:51 a.m. PDT, (8:51 a.m. EDT, 12:51 UTC) NASA’s Juno spacecraft will get closer to the cloud tops of Jupiter than at any other time during its prime mission.
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Nasa’s Juno spacecraft has skimmed the clouds above Jupiter as part of a mission that saw it make a record-breaking close approach to the planet.
“We are getting some intriguing early data returns as we speak”, said Scott Bolton, principal investigator of Juno from the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, in a statement. Specifically, NASA scientists will be releasing a ton of high-resolution images of the planet’s atmosphere, including the north and south poles. On Saturday, the spacecraft will once again zoom close by the gas giant and provide us with the some of the best close-up images of Jupiter ever snapped.
The probe launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on August 5, 2011, and having entered orbitaround Jupiter on July 4th of this year, will come closer to the planet than any spacecraft before it.
It will also be the first time that Juno’s suite of eight scientific instruments will be on, essentially marking the beginning of the science mission, officials said.
This weekend’s fly-by is one of 36 it will perform, but we back on Earth won’t see the first of the close-up images until next month. This view was captured on August 27 from a distance of 437,000 miles (Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / SwRI / MSSS).
Steve Levin from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory said, “This is our first opportunity, and there are bound to be surprises”.
Juno was to swing within some 4,200 kilometres of the solar system’s largest planet, the closest any spacecraft has passed, travelling at 130,000 miles per hour (208,000 kilometres per hour) at around 11:51pm AEST. Scientists are trying to determine how much water is on the giant planet, whether it has a dense core below its layers of gas, and why the giant hurricane-like storm that’s been raging on the planet for centuries is shrinking.
The approach is set to continue throughout Saturday and reach its closest point at 1.51pm – following the spacecraft’s dizzying flight path which involved escaping Earth’s orbit and moving into Jupiter’s. The mission is scheduled to end in February 2018.
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The image above was taken by the spacecraft’s on board camera – JunoCam- en route to its closest flyby for the planned mission. As such, they will be taking their time to ensure that all conclusions made are correct.
