TheJuno spacecraftis preserve its incredible mission around Jupiter , using its entourage of instrument to investigate the giant major planet like never before . Its periodic tight flybys thanks to its extremely elliptical area continue to allow spine - tingling great deal of Jupiter ’s turbulent atmosphere .
During February ’s flyby , the NASA space probe’sJunoCamcaught a dark round feature hem in by swirling messy swarm within the honey oil flow neighborhood recognize as Jet N6 . The region inthe photographis found in the northerly hemisphere approximately 55 ° from the equator . It was taken on February 12 , when the spacecraft was roughly 13,000 kilometers ( 8,000 naut mi ) from Jupiter ’s swarm top . That ’s slimly more than an Earth ’s diameter aside from the clouds .
The processing of this beautiful picture was done by citizen scientist and package engineer Kevin M. Gill . The image has been turn out by about 100 ° and its color heighten to make the contrast between the clouds appear more outstanding . The raw images from JunoCam areavailable onlineand NASA encourages people to give it a go doing their own processing of the images as there is often so much data to get through .
The charge is not there to just take pretty pictures of Jupiter , though . It is studying the amount of body of water on the planet , a fact that might provide fresh penetration into how the planet formed . It is also examine Jupiter ’s gravity and the great unwashed to work out the Department of the Interior of the planet . Among the suite of instruments , there ’s also a magnetometer to quantify the magnetized battlefield with much high precision to hopefully assemble enough datum to find out how it ’s produce .
February 12 marked the eighteenth flyby of the ballistic capsule around the gas giant . Junoarrived at Jupiter in 2016 . It perform a close flyby every 53 days with the next one gestate on April 6 . The mission has demonstrated its time value from the get - go , and in June 2018 it was extend for another three years . There are now 35 planned flybys , with the last one rig to be on July 30 , 2021 , which means we are just over midway through the spacecraft ’s full delegation .
On completion , NASA plans to deorbit the spacecraft during its last flyby . Thecontrolled swan diveinto the planet is necessary to annul contaminating potentially liveliness - bearing world like Jupiter ’s Sun Myung Moon Europa .
