Jupiter’s clouds colorful
A new image from NASA’s Juno spacecraft — flying just a little more than 8,000 miles above the surface of Jupiter — shows colorful, swirling clouds.
A new image from NASA’s Juno spacecraft shows the colorful, swirling clouds above Jupiter.
The image was taken Dec. 16 and released by NASA this month while the unmanned spacecraft was on its ninth close-up flyby, a mere 8,292 miles above the top of the planet’s clouds.
NASA officials said citizen scientists Gerald Eichstädt and Seán Doran processed the image using data from the JunoCam imager, a camera aboard the craft. As part of its public outreach, Juno’s raw photos are made available for people to look through and process.
Last summer, NASA released images showing Jupiter’s famous Great Red Spot in dramatic detail. The Great Red
Spot is a swirling storm about 11⁄2 times as wide as the Earth that has existed for perhaps more than 360 years.
Data gathered by science instruments indicate the spot has roots that penetrate about 200 miles into the atmosphere.
Arizona has ties to the $1.1 billion mission. University of Arizona Professor William Hubbard is involved in a key gravity experiment to determine whether Jupiter has a core.
The Juno spacecraft entered Jupiter’s orbit on July 4, 2016, after a fiveyear space voyage.
The spacecraft is shaped like a windmill and is about the size of an NBA basketball court. Scientific instruments and sensors on board are designed to tell scientists more about the fifth planet from the sun.
The spacecraft gets as near as about 2,100 miles above Jupiter’s clouds at times, the closest approach ever made by a spacecraft.
The mission has its limits, though.
Jupiter’s radiation is about 60 million times that on Earth. That’s the equivalent of having 100 million dental X-rays in a little over a year.
Scott Bolton, principal investigator of the Juno mission, has likened Jupiter to a “planet on steroids.”
Everything about it is extreme. The radiation will become more intense as the mission goes on and Juno descends from orbiting the poles to the harsher equatorial region, NASA scientists say.
The harsh radiation means the orbiting mission is scheduled to last about 20 months. The constant bombardment of high-energy particles will eventually damage the electronics aboard Juno.
The craft will finally drop out of orbit and into Jupiter’s dense atmosphere, where it will disintegrate.
Reach the reporter at anne.ryman@arizonarepublic.com or 602-4448072.