Check Out the Stunning New Images of Jupiter From NASA’s Juno Spacecraft

NASA’s Juno spacecraft has just released stunning images of Jupiter, captured during its 66th flyby of the largest and oldest planet in our solar system.

The Juno mission has been studying the Jovian system—Jupiter, along with its rings and many moons—to learn about the giant planet’s formation and evolution with the hope that it might shed light on the development of the entire solar system, per a NASA statement. The solar-powered spacecraft launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, in August 2011 and reached Jupiter in July 2016.

“Jupiter is the Rosetta Stone of our solar system. Juno is going there as our emissary—to interpret what Jupiter has to say,” Scott Bolton, Juno principal investigator and associate vice president of the Southwest Research Institute’s Science and Engineering Division, says in the statement.

Since Juno began investigating Jupiter eight years ago, the craft has been sending home data and images captured with its two-megapixel camera JunoCam from each flyby or “perijove,” the closest point in its orbit to Jupiter. Scientists on the ground then process the data into spectacular images, as Tom Howarth writes for Newsweek. The spacecraft’s most recent dispatch is from its 66th perijove, completed on October 23, which also took Juno close to Amalthea, Jupiter’s 104-mile-wide, potato-shaped moon.

Though Juno was not the first mission to orbit Jupiter, it was the first to dip toward both its poles, revealing giant cyclones swirling around both the north and south ends of the king of planets. Among many other revelations, the spacecraft is also credited with shedding light on Jupiter’s magnetic field, its strange core and the iconic and long-lived “Great Red Spot,” the largest storm in our solar system.

Originally, the Juno mission was only supposed to last until October 2017—enough time to complete 33 orbits and self-destruct in Jupiter’s turbulent atmosphere. The timing was chosen to avoid any risk of a collision with three of Jupiter’s largest moons: Europa, Ganymede and Callisto.

Each of these three moons has an icy surface that makes it “a prime candidate in the search for life beyond Earth,” per the statement, and crashing a human spacecraft into such a world could accidentally contaminate its ecosystem with terrestrial microbes.

NASA, however, extended the Juno mission to 2021, and by then its flight path had evolved and reassured scientists that there would be no risk of contamination anytime soon. As a result, they decided to further prolong the mission until September 2025. During this extended phase of its flight, the orbiter will circle the planet another 42 times, investigate its moons and complete the first-ever extensive exploration of Jupiter’s faint rings.

“Since its first orbit in 2016, Juno has delivered one revelation after another about the inner workings of this massive gas giant,” Bolton said in a 2021 statement. “With the extended mission, we will answer fundamental questions that arose during Juno’s prime mission while reaching beyond the planet to explore Jupiter’s ring system and Galilean satellites.”

The JunoCam page makes Juno’s raw image data publicly accessible and allows contributors to upload modified versions of the images to highlight special features. The mission doesn’t have a team of scientists dedicated to image processing, writes Forbes’ Jamie Carter, so it relies on the work of citizen scientists to create stunning and artful interpretations of the data.

Margherita Bassi | READ MORE

Margherita Bassi is a freelance journalist and trilingual storyteller. Her work has appeared in publications including BBC Travel, Discover magazine, Live Science, Atlas Obscura and Hidden Compass.