NASA’s Juno spacecraft has been broadcasting images of Jupiter to Earth since 2016, but a new video shows what it looks like from inside the spacecraft as it flies past Jupiter’s giant typhoons and storms.
The shot also offers a vanguard view of Jupiter’s largest moon, Ganymede – an icy orbit larger than Mercury.
Juno He flies within 645 miles of Ganymedea Last week – the closest spacecraft to the moon in more than two decades. (The last approach was made by NASA’s Galileo spacecraft in 2000.) Less than a day later, Juno made the 34th flight of Jupiter, taking pictures along the way.
Citizen scientist Gerald Eichstadt has compiled images of the two flights into a time-lapse video showing what it’s like to pass through a celestial body. The video is three minutes 30 seconds long, but in fact, it took Juno about 15 hours to cover the 735,000 miles between Ganymede and Jupiter, and then about three more hours to travel between Jupiter’s poles.
Early footage revealed the surface of the Ganymede crater, which features dark patches that likely formed when ice went straight from solid to gas. If you look closely, you can see one of the largest and brightest craters on Ganymede, Gears, surrounded by a white glow of ejected material.
When the photos were taken, Juno was traveling at nearly 41,600 miles per hour. But as the spacecraft approached Jupiter, its speed increased: Juno’s gravity accelerated to nearly 130,000 miles per hour as it flew.
Video shows Jupiter’s turbulent surface emerging from the dark abyss of space like a watercolor painting. The white oval represents a group of giant storms in Jupiter’s southern hemisphere known as the “String of Pearls”. (There are five of them in the video.) A flash of white light represents lightning.
“This animation shows how beautiful space exploration can be,” said Scott Bolton, Juno principal investigator at the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, Texas. He said in a statement.
“Today, as we approach the exciting prospect of humans being able to visit space in Earth orbit, it fuels our imagination decades into the future, when humans visit alien worlds in our solar system,” he added.
Juno has solved some of Jupiter’s mysteries
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Jupiter.
NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS, Tanya Olekswick
Juno flies in an elliptical orbit around Jupiter, approaching the planet once every 53 days. But the close proximity of Ganymede shortened that orbit to 43 days.
The spacecraft’s primary goal is to gain insight into Jupiter’s origins and evolution by mapping its magnetic field, studying the northern and southern lights (or aurora borealis), and measuring atmospheric elements – including temperature, cloud movement, and water concentration.
The spacecraft entered Jupiter’s orbit in July 2016. (Jupiter is about 390 million miles from Earth). Its mission was originally supposed to end this month, but NASA has extended Juno’s lifespan to 2025.
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Jupiter as seen by the Juno probe during its tenth flyby.
NASA / JPL-Caltech / SwRI / MSSS / Gerald Eichstadt / Sean Doran
Juno Previous track This has led to important discoveries, such as the fact that most of Jupiter’s lightning is concentrated at the North Pole. The spacecraft also found that storms tend to appear in symmetrical clusters at Jupiter’s poles, and that the planet’s powerful auroras produce ultraviolet light invisible to the human eye.
Just this week, Juno’s measurements helped scientists figure it out Why did this aurora form in the first place: Atoms, or electrically charged ions, “surf” electromagnetic waves in Jupiter’s magnetic field before hitting the planet’s atmosphere.
