Hold on tight as you watch this new Jupiter footage.
This time-lapse view shows the perspective of NASA’s Juno spacecraft as it flew just 2,050 miles (3,300 kilometers) above the gas giant’s cloud tops on April 9. a top speed of 131,000 mph (210,000 km/h) relative to Jupiter.
“Citizen scientist Andrea Luck created this animated footage using raw JunoCam image data,” NASA officials wrote in a statement. (opens in a new tab) Friday (May 27).
Related: Juno Takes Stunning Photos of Jupiter’s Crescent and Ganymede
That’s more than seven times faster than the speed of the International Space Station orbiting Earth and about five times faster than crewed Apollo missions traveling as they departed Earth for the moon, researchers said. NASA officials in the statement.
The colorful images were created from the raw images from the JunoCam instrument, which officials upload to an image processing gallery that allows citizen scientists to add their ideas to the raw data.
While Juno’s initial prime target was Jupiter, in January 2021 NASA authorized an extension of the mission’s mandate to focus a bit more on the planet’s four major moons, specifically Ganymede, Europa and Io. Juno will operate until September 2025, assuming it remains healthy.
“With the extended mission, we will answer fundamental questions that arose during Juno’s primary mission while reaching beyond the planet to explore Jupiter’s ring system and Galilean satellites,” said the lead researcher Scott Bolton, of the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, in a NASA statement. statement (opens in a new tab) when the extension was announced.
Radiation will likely be the main threat to the mission as it attempts to continue its work for the next three years, but as long as Juno is active it will serve as a scout for future missions to Jupiter, the system’s largest planet. solar.
In the 2030s, for example, NASA’s Europa Clipper and the European Space Agency’s JUICE (Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer) mission plan to visit Jupiter’s moons directly.
The new James Webb Space Telescope will also examine the giant planet from afar in its next round of Cycle 1 observations. Webb’s work will add to years of data collected as part of the space telescope’s Outer Planet Atmospheres Legacy program. Hubble, which aims to study the gas giants of the solar system at least once a year on Earth.
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