NASA’s Juno spacecraft saw this striking vista during its most recent close flyby of Jupiter. This view highlights the contrast between the colorful South Equatorial Belt and the mostly white Southern Tropical Zone, a latitude that also features Jupiter’s most famous phenomenon, the persistent, anticyclonic storm known as the Great Red Spot.
Citizen scientist Kevin M. Gill created this image using data from the spacecraft’s JunoCam imager. The raw image was taken on July 20, 2019, at 9:37 p.m. PDT (July 21, 2019, at 12:37 a.m. EDT) as the Juno spacecraft performed its 21st close flyby of Jupiter. At the time the image was taken, the spacecraft was 26,697 miles (42,965 kilometers) from the tops of the clouds, above a latitude of 46 degrees south.
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 Juno is at https://www.nasa.gov/juno and https://missionjuno.swri.edu.
Image credit:
Image data: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS
Image processing by Kevin M. Gill, licensed under CC by 3.0