Planet Jupiter Flyby: Perijove 11 | NASA Juno Mission

Planet Jupiter Flyby: Perijove 11 | NASA Juno Mission

Here comes planet Jupiter. NASA's robotic spacecraft Juno is continuing on its highly elongated orbits around our Solar System's largest planet. This video is from perijove 11 in early 2018, the eleventh time Juno passed near Jupiter since it arrived in mid-2016. This time-lapse, color-enhanced video covers about four hours and morphs between 36 JunoCam images. The video begins with Jupiter rising as Juno approaches from the north. As Juno reaches its closest view—from about 3,500 kilometers over Jupiter's cloud tops—the spacecraft captures the great planet in tremendous detail. Juno passes light zones and dark belts of clouds that circle the planet, as well as numerous swirling circular storms, many of which are larger than hurricanes on Earth. After the perijove, Jupiter recedes into the distance, then displaying the unusual clouds that appear over Jupiter's south. To get desired science data, Juno swoops so close to Jupiter that its instruments are exposed to very high levels of radiation.

Each perijove passes near a new part of Jupiter's cloud tops. A perijove indicates the point in the Juno spacecraft's orbit when it comes closest to planet Jupiter's center. If we measure by volume, approximately 1,300 Earths could fit inside Jupiter.

The Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), a division of Caltech in Pasadena, California, manages the Juno mission for the principal investigator, Scott J. Bolton, of the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. Juno is part of NASA’s New Frontiers Program. This is managed at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, for the agency’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. Lockheed Martin Space in Denver built and operates the spacecraft.

Learn more about NASA's Juno mission:

https://www.nasa.gov/juno

https://www.missionjuno.swri.edu

Video Credit & License: NASA, Juno, SwRI, MSSS
Processing: Gerald Eichstadt
Duration: 1 minute
Release Date: Feb. 23, 2018

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