NASA’s Juno spacecraft has got amazing images of our biggest solar neighbour, Jupiter the Gas Giant.
Jupiter’s moon Io casts a very large shadow over the mosaic clouds of the gas giant. This is a fascinating photograph, a work of celestial art.
NASA’s Juno Spacecraft is in its third year of orbiting Jupiter, skimming right past it every 53 days.
The Juno Spacecraft has a clear priority mission to study the Gas Giant’s atmosphere and interior.
Juno spacecraft has an onboard camera as well, clicking raw images which are consequently uploaded online.
JunoCam and the artists recreating Jupiter Images
JunoCam is a crowdsource publicly available camera for volunteers. They consequently make images out of the raw image data. Juno Spacecraft uploads as it orbits the Gas Giant every 53 days.
The JunoCam that is sending out this data is a rather small one, creating a constraint for clicking photos from far away.
However, it does have a wider field of view which is one of the pros of having a smaller telescope onboard the Juno Spacecraft.
Relying on the public in helping analyse the data is a leap of faith by NASA which is paying off. The image of this huge eclipse stands proof of this fact.
Io – The closest moon
- Io completes one orbit every 1.77 earth days due to the massive gravitational pull of our neighbourhood Gas Giant. This also causes Io’s volcanic volatility, creating massive amounts of heat in the process of gravity tug of war.
- The lack of a scientific team for the purpose of analysing the data that Juno is sending down to planet Earth is a huge downside. It shows a clear lack of funding with NASA and certainly a lack of strategising correctly.
- Eclipse photo is famous because of the public giving input into formatting the data into an art of sorts.
