So long, and thanks for all the pics

THIS JULY, JUNO ENDS ITS TWO-YEAR MISSION TO STUDY AND PHOTOGRAPH JUPITER. HERE, WE LOOK BACK OVER SOME OF THE INCREDIBLE SNAPSHOTS THAT HAVE TRANSFORMED OUR UNDERSTANDING OF THE SOLAR SYSTEM’S BIGGEST PLANET

The two-year Juno mission is coming to a close. We take a look back over some of its incredible pictures of Jupiter.

In classical mythology, the god Jupiter surrounded himself in clouds to keep his antics hidden from view. Only his wife, Juno, could see through the veil to his true nature. And so it is with the NASA spacecraft of the same name. The secrets of the formation of the whole Solar System lie below Jupiter’s all-encompassing clouds, just waiting to be discovered. Theories about our Solar System formation all begin with the collapse of a giant cloud of gas and dust, otherwise known as a nebula, the majority of which formed the Sun. Like the Sun, Jupiter is mostly hydrogen and helium, so it too must have formed early on, capturing most of the leftover material after our star formed. How this happened, however, is unclear. Did a massive planetary core form first and gravitationally capture all that gas, or did an unstable region collapse inside the nebula, triggering the planet’s formation? Once processed, the data taken by Juno’s instruments will give researchers insights on how the planet formed and what the conditions in the early Solar System were like. But it also carries an instrument called JunoCam, which has taken a raft of images that so-called citizen scientists from the general public can process, and submit back to NASA. The results have been spectacular.