The latest images from the Juno mission at Jupiter includes views of giant storms and vortexes on the gas giant world in amazing detail.
A new batch of images recently arrived at Earth from JunoCam, the visible light camera on board the Juno spacecraft. The camera has provided stunning views of Jupiter since the spacecraft’s arrival in 2016. Citizen scientists and imaging enthusiasts act as the camera’s virtual imaging team, participating in key steps of the process by making suggestions of areas on Jupiter to take pictures and doing the image editing work.
This lead image, edited by Kevin Gill, provides a 3-D-like view of a giant storm. How big are these swirling masses? The SETI Institute weighs in:
You can find all the raw data plus a gallery of processed images from people all around the world at the JunoCam website. Kevin Gill is one of our favorite image editing gurus, and so we feature his Juno images regularly. He also posts on Twitter, and has a Flickr gallery of the work he’s done with data from Juno, the Mars rovers, and more, including his personal astrophotography and landscape images.
But wait, there’s more! Juno’s latest close pass by Jupiter, Perijove 38, includes view of the planet’s northern hemisphere, and here’s a view from another of our favorite image editors, Andrea Luck:
Credit: Nasa/SwRI/MSSS/AndreaLuck
Juno also took a look at Jupiter’s moon Io during this pass:
During it’s time in orbit, Juno has made discoveries about Jupiter’s interior structure, magnetic field, and magnetosphere, and has found its atmospheric dynamics to be far more complex than scientists previously thought.