NASA’s Photo of Jupiter Snapped By Juno is Breathtaking

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NASA continues to amaze us with beautiful images from space. Earlier, they made public a “glittering collection of stars” inside the constellation Carina.

Now, they just made public a breathtaking image of Jupiter, the largest planet in our Solar System. NASA’s spacecraft Juno has been taking rounds of the planet for a few years now and it keeps sending back to earth images of the planet. The last snap is a winner, though!

The Beautiful Gas Giant

In the photo, you can see the southern end of the giant planet, showing off the bands around the planet and the swirling storms. Here is how NASA described the photo:

“This image of Jupiter’s southern hemisphere was captured by NASA’s Juno spacecraft on the outbound leg of a close flyby of the gas-giant planet. Citizen scientist Kevin M. Gill created this image using data from the spacecraft’s JunoCam imager.

The color-enhanced image was taken at 11:31 p.m. PDT on May 23, 2018 (2:31 a.m. EDT on May 24), as the spacecraft performed its 13th close flyby of Jupiter. At the time, Juno was about 44,300 miles (71,400 kilometers) from the planet’s cloud tops, above a southern latitude of 71 degrees.”

Juno has some powerful camera, able to snap beautiful photos even at a distance of 44,300 miles. The image has incredible details, and you can see them in the swirling storm clouds and the bands.

Ever since Juno entered Jupiter’s orbit in July 2016, NASA has received photos of the planet, but scientists haven’t yet discovered much about it. So far, they have found out that the weather systems on the planet stretch down 200 miles from the top of the clouds. But nobody knows what lies beneath those clouds. Some researchers agree that there has to be some kind of surface, but they don’t have the data to show how it could look like.

Doris’s passion for writing started to take shape in college where she was editor-in-chief of the college newspaper. Even though she ended up working in IT for more than 7 years, she’s now back to what he always enjoyed doing. With a true passion for technology, Doris mostly covers tech-related topics.