NASA’s Juno spacecraft has sent back to Earth the first pictures it has captured of Jupiter since it arrived at the Solar System’s largest planet on July 4. When Juno gets to its closest approach to Jupiter, it will try to peer through the clouds to reveal what drives the red spot, which is akin to a giant hurricane on Earth.
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This colour image of Jupiter also caught its Great Red Spot, and the moons Io, Europa and Ganymede. On Sunday, when these images were taken, Juno was 2.7 million miles away from Jupiter’s swirling clouds. Scott Bolton, principal investigator for the Juno mission, described it by saying that musicians “can literally play Jupiter”. The planet is surrounded by three of its four largest moons. While we wait, head on over to Juno’s mission page to suggest where JunoCam should look.
This color view from NASA’s Juno spacecraft is made from some of the first images taken by JunoCam after the spacecraft entered orbit around Jupiter on July 5th (UTC). JunoCam is the camera aboard NASA’s Juno mission.
After a stunning orbital entry on July 4 – the probe, which had been traveling at upward of 125,000 miles per hour, managed to slow down and enter orbit within a second and a centimeter of its target – Juno’s instruments are back online.
NASA administrator Charlie Bolden compared Juno’s arrival to the US Independence Day as milestones in America’s history. High resolution images will come in a few weeks, say mission scientists.
It will take over 37 orbits, each lasting 14 days, for Juno to study the composition of Jupiter in depth.
“We’re quite pleased that we survived going through Jupiter orbit insertion”, Candice Hansen-Koharcheck, a scientist at Planetary Science Institute who is responsible for the operation of the camera, told the New York Times. JunoCam will continue to image Jupiter during Juno’s capture orbits. Higher resolution images will be transmitted on a closer flypast on 27 August.
JunoCam is a colour, visible-light camera created to capture remarkable pictures of Jupiter’s poles and cloud tops.
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NASA engineers are busy downloading more pictures of Jupiter taken from the Juno space probe and uploading them to the space agency’s website.
