NASA’s Juno captures astounding pictures of Jupiter to celebrate its four year anniversary

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Juno is the spacecraft sent by NASA to study and understand the origin and evolution of Jupiter. It is currently revolving very near to the planet and sending back astounding pictures of Jupiter and its moon Ganymede. Following its first batch of pictures, the spacecraft has sent newer photos.

These images are from Juno's 28th flyby and mark the four year anniversary of the spacecraft in the orbit around Jupiter. Launched on 5 August 2011, the solar power driven craft arrived at the largest planet in our solar system on 4 July 2016.

Jupiter as captured by Juno on July 28, 2020. Image credit: Kevin Gill/NASA/JunoCam

Jupiter as captured by Juno on July 28, 2020. Image credit: Kevin Gill/NASA/JunoCam

Its elliptical orbit makes Juno come close to the planet after every 53-day period and it is then that it captures the crucial pictures. According to a Forbes report, every one of these dips is called a perijove, which is Greek for the extreme points in the orbit of one body around another.

After every perijove, Juno sends back "raw imagers" that are stored in JunoCam on the mission’s official website. These are then downloaded and processed to turn into the finished pictures by certain citizen scientists.

Scientists working on the mission at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) also tweet pictures sent back by Juno.

Kevin M Gill, a software engineer at NASA JPL, is one of the citizen scientists working for JunoCam. He spoke to Forbes about the images sent by Juno.

“Juno’s images have taught us so much about the dynamic nature of Jupiter's atmosphere in a level of detail that we haven’t ever seen before, especially when correlated with data from the infrared imager, magnetometer data, and with Earth-bound observations,” he said.



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