On April 9, 2022, as NASA’s Juno mission completed its 41st close flyby of Jupiter, its JunoCam instrument captured what it would look like to ride along with the spacecraft. Citizen scientist Andrea Luck created this animated sequence using raw JunoCam image data.
At about 87,000 miles (140,000 kilometers) in diameter, Jupiter is the largest planet in the solar system. At the point of closest approach on April 9, Juno was just over 2,050 miles (3,300 kilometers) above Jupiter’s colorful cloud tops. At that moment, it was traveling at about 131,000 MPH (210,000 kilometers per hour) relative to the planet.
By comparison, at closest approach Juno was more than 10 times closer to Jupiter than satellites in geosynchronous orbit are to Earth, traveling at a speed about five times faster than the Apollo missions did when they left Earth for the Moon.
JunoCam’s raw images are available for the public to peruse and process into image products at https://missionjuno.swri.edu/junocam/processing. More information about NASA citizen science can be found at https://science.nasa.gov/citizenscience and https://www.nasa.gov/solve/opportunities/citizenscience.
More information about Juno is at https://www.nasa.gov/juno and https://missionjuno.swri.edu. For more about this finding and other science results, see https://www.missionjuno.swri.edu/science-findings.
Image credit:
Image data: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS
Image processing by AndreaLuck © CC BY