The Juno spacecraft takes an accurate picture of Jupiter’s atmosphere and two of the planet’s moons

NASA’s Juno spacecraft has revealed an accurate picture of the atmosphere Jupiter and the moons Callisto and Io. The newly released JunoCam image was taken less than a year ago, when the Juno-Jupiter probe completed its 38th close flyby of our solar system’s largest planet.

According to the “Space” website, the image shows the arc of Jupiter’s horizon and the planet’s rolling clouds, also capturing the moons Io and Callisto, and the image was taken when Juno was about 8,700 miles away (14,000 km) above the cloud tops. Jupiter, at 69 degrees latitude, was traveling at about 123,000 mph (198,000 km/h) relative to the planet, according to a NASA statement.

Scientist Gerald Eichstadt used raw data from JunoCam to create the original version of this image, and NASA has revealed that another scientist, Thomas Thomopoulos, then processed it, enlarging it and making color enhancements.

It should be noted that Juno recently flew past the four major Galilean moons of Jupiter, the ice-covered ocean world Europa, and Juno also made a close approach to the fourth moon Ganymede in April 2021, providing images of Europa’s largest moon. of the solar system during these trips.

NASA provides raw images to JunoCam where they are available for the public to view and process, as two scientists did with a recently released Juno image with nearly a year’s worth of data.