A new series of images recently arrived on Earth from JunoCam, the visible light camera aboard the Juno spacecraft at Jupiter. The camera has offered a breathtaking view of the world of gas giants since the spacecraft arrived in 2016. Citizen scientists and imaging enthusiasts act as the camera’s virtual imaging team, taking part in key steps in the process by suggesting areas on Jupiter to take pictures and do the imaging work.
This main picture, edited by Kevin Gill, is another piece of madness: a look straight into a huge storm.
And we like Kevin’s stance on this whole process:
Jupiter’s swirling atmosphere looks like classic oil paintings in these images.
How big are these storms?
The JunoCam website has all of the raw data, as well as a gallery of processed images from people around the world. Kevin Gill, one of our favorite photo editing gurus, regularly posts to Twitter and has a Flickr gallery of the work he’s done with data from Juno, the Mars rovers, and others, including his personal astrophotography and landscape imagery.
During his time in orbit, Juno made discoveries about the internal structure, magnetic field, and magnetosphere of Jupiter and found that atmospheric dynamics are far more complex than previously thought.
The mission was recently extended with the goal of keeping Juno running until September 2025 – or how long the spacecraft can continue to operate in the harsh environment around Jupiter.
While Juno has only focused his attention on the giant planet so far, the mission expansion will include observations of Jupiter’s rings and large moons, with targeted observations and close flyby of the moons Ganymede, Europa and Io planned.
This will be the first close flyby of these moons since the Galileo mission 1995-2003, so we look forward to more amazing images.
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