NASA’s Juno orbiter has returned its latest batch of images of giant Jupiter, which are as impressive as ever.
Despite suffering from radiation damage earlier this year, its JunoCam camera—boasting just a two-megapixel resolution—continues to take and return arresting images of the planet’s cloud tops.
In recent months, Juno has been sending back images of Io, the closest of Jupiter’s large Galilean moons (Io, Europa, Callisto and Ganymede) and the most volcanic world in the solar system.
Juno didn’t pass close to any of Jupiter’s 92 moons this time, but it did snap an image of one in the distance.
Juno got a pixelated image of Amalthea, Jupiter’s fifth-largest moon. Potato-shaped Amalthea orbits closer to Jupiter than Io and takes less than half a day to complete one orbit. It’s part of the planet’s faint ring structure.
Its radius is 52 miles (84 kilometers), which is about 20 times smaller than Earth’s moon.
In May, Juno sent back an image of Amalthea above Jupiter’s “Great Red Spot,” an anticyclonic storm roughly the diameter of Earth that has been raging since at least 1831 and has 425 miles per hour winds.
That was planetary scientists’ first glimpse of the moon since 2000 when NASA’s Galileo spacecraft revealed impact craters, hills and valleys on Amalthea.
Last year, scientists found 12 new moons orbiting Jupiter, just 0.6 miles to two miles in size, and all orbiting over 550 miles from the giant planet.
Nine of the new moons orbit in the opposite direction to the inner moons, which suggests that they are asteroids or fragments of comets captured by Jupiter’s gravity.
About the size of a school bus and the farthest solar-powered spacecraft, NASA’s Juno launched in 2011 and has been orbiting Jupiter since 2016.
It does so in a highly elliptical path that sees it pass close to the planet’s polar regions once a month.
Each close approach is called a perijove. It’s the only time Juno takes and transmits images back to Earth via NASA’s Deep Space Network.
However, since there’s no dedicated team of imaging scientists, volunteer “citizen scientists” download the raw data from the mission’s special website after each perijove and create the beautiful images you see here.
The images were taken by Juno on July 17, 2024, during its 63rd close flyby (perijove). Its next perijove will take place on August 18, 2024.
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Wishing you clear skies and wide eyes.
