Nasa has released amazing new pictures of Jupiter, the 5th planet from the Sun and the largest in the Solar System. The pictures were obtained from Nasa’s Juno spacecraft. The Juno mission is part of the New Frontiers Project and set off on its mission from Cape Canaveral in Florida in 2011.
While it took 5 years for the probe to reach Jupiter, which is 775 million kms from Earth, it has been carrying out its mission to research the giant planet’s composition, gravitational and magnetic fields as well as its polar magnetosphere. It will also seek to discover how the planet was formed, which includes trying to discover if there exists a solid surface beneath the thick coating of gas and the 600km/h winds that shroud the entire planet.
The images taken as close as 5,000kms above the planet’s surface are truly astounding and show it in greater detail than ever before. While previous fly pasts by probes, notably the Voyager mission of the late 1970s, have shown images of Jupiter improvements in photographic and technological equipment have given greater insight and detail than ever before.
This isn’t the first time that the New Horizons project has got close to Jupiter, the probe, also called New Horizons, and launched in 2006 (the fastest ever probe launched from Earth) passed by Jupiter in 2007, however its primary goal was to reach and investigate the former-planet Pluto – which it achieved in 2015 and it is currently on its way to explore further icy micro-planets at the furthest edges of our solar system. But while New Horizons only passed by Jupiter, Juno is only the second probe to actually orbit our massive neighbour, after Galileo from 1995 to 2003.
These unbelievable, non-artificially enhanced, images show the vast stormy clouds of the atmosphere, the famous ‘red spot’ which could easy swallow planet earth whole and the vast circular winds that circumnavigate the planet.
The new images being released by Nasa coincidentally coincide with magnificent new images of Jupiter taken from Earth by the Gemini North Telescope in Hawaii and are the sharpest observations of the planet ever taken from the ground. The images were subject to a technique known as ‘lucky imaging’ which renders out the obstruction of Earth’s atmosphere.
Let’s hope that further images emerge in the near future of this most epic of planets because in July 2021 the probe will descend into Jupiter’s crushing atmosphere and will be obliterated. In fact it is believed that Jupiter’s magnetosphere and the orbit of its moons may even destroy the probe before then - we wait and hope!
COMMENTS