Juno, A NASA’S Spacecraft, May Have The Best Pictures Of Jupiter

While on Earth, people are waiting impatiently for Oscar 2019 to announce its winners, in space, a NASA vessel is preparing to outshine all of them.

Juno, the space probe in question that orbits Jupiter just made its 18th approach to the planet and maintained a distance of 13,000 km. The image below was taken by JunoCam imager when the vessel flew by the planet’s northern half. On the left-hand side of the picture, there is a brown spot is in a region named Jet N6, which is seemingly whirling mass of air.

After the raw image was handled by Kevin M. Gill, a software engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, it turns out to be like this:

Ever since Juno started its mission around Jupiter in July 2016, it has been constantly taking pictures of the outermost layer of its clouds with great interest. And for the course of over 2 years, it has had the chance to encounter all kinds of impressive images that were accidentally created by the planet’s clouds. Some of the highlights are a dolphin-like shape, the swirling patterns that may remind you of Van Gogh’s paintings, and the Christmas Poo from South Park. Things can even get as excited as a volcanic eruption on Io, a Jupiter’s moon.

Last year, NASA decided to re-plan Juno’s mission and allowed it an addition of 42 months in Jupiter’s orbit. It also switched to 14-day orbits because of a potential problem with the fuel system. Shorter orbiting courses would translate to less time for the probe to gather information for scientific purposes.

NASA also announced that the spacecraft was in excellent state and the results yielded from its mission were of great value. Juno will continue its mission until July 2021 and follow-up activities will end in 2022.

This incident had nothing to do with Juno the spacecraft but in 2007, a movie also called Juno was a nominee of 2008 Oscar’s Best Picture. It was not the winner though.