Having survived being slingshot around Jupiter, NASA’s Juno spacecraft turned its camera back on this week and snapped a picture of its new home.
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Now that the Juno spacecraft is settled in orbit around Jupiter, the real work is about to begin. The picture was captured this Sunday (July 10) using JunoCam instrument aboard the craft. In its first orbit around Jupiter, the spacecraft is in a highly oblong orbit that takes 51 days to complete.
The image was taken on July 10 at 1730 GMT at a distance of 4.3 million kilometers (2.7 million miles).
Notable on the photograph are atmospheric features on Jupiter, including the famous Great Red Spot, and three of the four Galilean satellites: volcanic Io, icy Europa, and asteroid-scarred Ganymede, the planet’s largest moon.
NASA’s Juno mission to Jupiter has returned its first image after being sent into orbit last week. The first high-resolution image is expected to be taken on August 27, when the spacecraft will make its next close pass to Jupiter, she added.
JunoCam is not considered one of the mission’s science instruments.
Earlier this month, Juno sent back a grainy image of Jupiter and its largest moons, but this is the first in-orbit image taken by the probe.
As our primary example of a giant planet, Jupiter can also provide critical knowledge for understanding the planetary systems being discovered around other stars. According to the NASA website, JunoCam is a visible-light camera that was specially created to capture images below Jupiter’s clouds as well as the planet’s poles.
After a five-year, 1.74 billion-mile journey, NASA’s Juno spacecraft has finally just returned its first image from within Jupiter’s orbit. The Juno team is working to put captured images online for public consumption, and it will continue to share them during the spacecraft’s 37 orbits over the next year.
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Juno’s mission is scheduled to end in February 2018, and will culminate with an intentional death dive into the planet’s thick atmosphere.
