Explanation:
Watch Juno zoom past Jupiter.
NASA’s robotic spacecraft
Juno
is continuing on its now month-long,
highly-elongated orbits around our Solar System’s largest planet.
The featured video is from perijove 16, the sixteenth time that
Juno
passed near Jupiter since it arrived in mid-2016.
Each perijove passes near a
slightly different part of Jupiter’s cloud tops.
This color-enhanced video has been digitally composed from 21 JunoCam still images, resulting in a 125-fold time-lapse.
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.
As Juno moves away, the remarkable
dolphin-shaped cloud is visible.
After the perijove,
Jupiter recedes into the distance, now 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.