NASA’s Juno spacecraft was a
little more than one Earth diameter from Jupiter when it captured this mind-bending, color-enhanced view of the planet’s tumultuous atmosphere. Jupiter
completely fills the image, with only a hint of the terminator (where daylight
fades to night) in the upper right corner, and no visible limb (the curved edge
of the planet).
Juno took this image of
colorful, turbulent clouds in Jupiter’s northern hemisphere on Dec. 16, 2017 at
9:43 a.m. PST (12:43 p.m. EST) from 8,292 miles (13,345 kilometers) above the
tops of Jupiter’s clouds, at a latitude of 48.9 degrees.
The spatial scale in this
image is 5.8 miles/pixel (9.3 kilometers/pixel). Citizen scientists Gerald
Eichstädt and Seán Doran processed this image using data from the JunoCam
imager.
NASA's Juno spacecraft,
which arrived at Jupiter on July 4, 2016, is studying the planet in detail to
give scientists a better idea of the gas giant's weather, magnetic environment
and formation history.
Juno is one of NASA's three
New Frontiers probes. The others are New Horizons, which flew by Pluto in 2015,
and OSIRIS-REx, which is expected to fly to asteroid 101955 Bennu in 2020 to
collect a sample and return it to Earth.
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