Juno Sends Back Awesome New Picture of Jupiter

Perseverance might have sucked up a lot of the oxygen in the room this week as far as astrophotography debuts go, but the Juno spacecraft is still turning out amazing photographs as well.

jupiter southern hemisphere juno
Image by NASA/JPL-Caltech

Sent to study our solar system’s largest planet, Jupiter, Juno’s “principal goal is to understand the origin and evolution of Jupiter. Underneath its dense cloud cover, Jupiter safeguards secrets to the fundamental processes and conditions that governed our solar system during its formation. As our primary example of a giant planet, Jupiter can also provide critical knowledge for understanding the planetary systems being discovered around other stars.”

And, thanks to NASA, we get to see the results of its research first hand. An image captured last December gives us a “…view of Jupiter’s turbulent atmosphere from NASA’s Juno spacecraft includes several of the planet’s southern jet streams. Using data from Juno’s instruments, scientists discovered that Jupiter’s powerful atmospheric jet streams extend far deeper than previously imagined. Evidence from Juno shows the jet streams and belts penetrate about 1,800 miles (3,000 kilometers) down into the planet.”

You can view the image for yourself at this link

As for what you’re seeing, the “Great Red Spot is also visible on the horizon, nearly rotated out of view as Juno sped away from Jupiter at about 30 miles per second (48 kilometers per second), which is more than 100,000 mph (160,900 kilometers per hour).” 

Credit to the folks over at DPReview for bringing this to the web’s attention. 

In case you missed our Perseverance photos, you can check them out here and here

Check out some of our other photography news at this link right here!

[DPReview]

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Kehl is our staff photography news writer since 2017 and has over a decade of experience in online media and publishing and you can get to know him better here and follow him on Insta.

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