NASA's Juno spacecraft was a little more than one Earth diameter from Jupiter when it captured this mind-bending, color-enhanced view of the planet's tumultuous atmosphere.
Jupiter completely fills the image, with only a hint of the terminator (where daylight fades to night) in the upper right corner, and no visible limb (the curved edge of the planet).
Juno took this image of colorful, turbulent clouds in Jupiter's northern hemisphere on Dec. 16, 2017 at 9:43 a.m. PST (12:43 p.m. EST) from 8,292 miles (13,345 kilometers) above the tops of Jupiter's clouds, at a latitude of 48.9 degrees.
The spatial scale in this image is 5.8 miles/pixel (9.3 kilometers/pixel)..
Citizen scientists Gerald Eichstädt and Seán Doran processed this image using data from the JunoCam imager.
JunoCam's raw images are available at www.missionjuno.swri.edu/junocam for the public to peruse and process into image products.
More information about Juno is online at http://www.nasa.gov/juno and http://missionjuno.swri.edu .
NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory manages the Juno mission for the principal investigator, Scott Bolton, of Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. Juno is part of NASA's New Frontiers Program, which is managed at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, for NASA's Science Mission Directorate. Lockheed Martin Space Systems, Denver, built the spacecraft. Caltech in Pasadena, California, manages JPL for NASA.
Name | Value | Additional Values |
---|---|---|
Target | Jupiter | |
System | Jupiter | |
Target Type | Planet | |
Mission | Juno | |
Instrument Host | Juno | |
Host Type | Orbiter | |
Instrument | JunoCam | |
Detector | ||
Extra Keywords | Atmosphere, Color, Visual | |
Acquisition Date | ||
Release Date | 2018-01-04 | |
Date in Caption | 2017-12-16 | |
Image Credit | NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/Gerald Eichstadt/Sean Doran | |
Source | photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA21973 | |
Identifier | PIA21973 |