Tag: Juno

Fly Over Jupiter

Take a series of photos from the Juno spacecraft and just project them in sequence to make a timelapse movie of the spacecraft swinging past Jupiter. Sounds easy… Right?

Not easy at all. As the spacecraft orbited past the planet the perspective changes rapidly. To make a natural seeming animation much more would have to be done. Mathematician Gerald Eichstaedt did just that… Taking 36 images he projected each image on a mathematically modeled sphere, then panned through each image using the orbital trajectory of the spacecraft to create a view to simulate actually being there.

Further work by filmmaker Seán Doran smoothed the resulting video into an even more natural view. This created the video posted below. You can see the original video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AuOy-shbQuM&feature=youtu.be

The result is simply stunning, take look at what it would have been like to be there as Juno swung past the planet just a few thousand miles above the cloudtops.


Jupiter: Juno Perijove 06 from Sean Doran on Vimeo.

By Jove!

Jupiter from Juno
A spectacular image taken by the Juno spacecraft just above the cloud tops of Jupiter.
Waves of clouds at 37.8 degrees latitude dominate this three-dimensional Jovian cloudscape, courtesy of NASA’s Juno spacecraft. JunoCam obtained this enhanced-color picture on May 19, 2017, at 5:50 UTC from an altitude of 5,500 miles (8,900 kilometers).
Image credit: NASA/SWRI/MSSS/Gerald Eichstadt/Sean Doran

A Whole New Jupiter: First Science Results from NASA’s Juno Mission

JPL Press Release…

Early science results from NASA’s Juno mission to Jupiter portray the largest planet in our solar system as a complex, gigantic, turbulent world, with Earth-sized polar cyclones, plunging storm systems that travel deep into the heart of the gas giant, and a mammoth, lumpy magnetic field that may indicate it was generated closer to the planet’s surface than previously thought.

Jupiter South Pole from Juno
This image shows Jupiter’s south pole, as seen by NASA’s Juno spacecraft from an altitude of 32,000 miles (52,000 kilometers). Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/Betsy Asher Hall/Gervasio Robles
“We are excited to share these early discoveries, which help us better understand what makes Jupiter so fascinating,” said Diane Brown, Juno program executive at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “It was a long trip to get to Jupiter, but these first results already demonstrate it was well worth the journey.”

Juno launched on Aug. 5, 2011, entering Jupiter’s orbit on July 4, 2016. The findings from the first data-collection pass, which flew within about 2,600 miles (4,200 kilometers) of Jupiter’s swirling cloud tops on Aug. 27, are being published this week in two papers in the journal Science, as well as 44 papers in Geophysical Research Letters.

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