NASA’s Juno has done it again. In the wake of its 60th orbit of Jupiter, the school bus-sized spacecraft has transmitted another tranche of data across the solar system that has been transformed into spectacular images.
They come from a team of citizen scientists on Earth, who each month receive the raw data from JunoCam, a two-megapixel “outreach” camera that takes images as it spins while traveling at 127,000 mph. The resulting data is then stitched together, processed and colorized to produce the wonderful images you see here.
Juno currently completes an orbit of Jupiter every 34 days. However, it’s an elliptical orbit, meaning it only gets close to Jupiter itself for a few hours in each orbit. This period is called a perijove, and it’s when JunoCam is switched on.
Just before its latest perijove on April 9, JunoCam was switched on early to take images of two of Jupiter’s moons, Io and Europa. Io is the most volcanic world in the solar system, with eruptions orders of magnitude bigger than anything similar on Earth.
In December and January, Juno had super-close encounters with Io, reaching just 930 miles (1,500 kilometers) from the moon’s surface. It was the closest pass since NASA’s Galileo probe imaged the volcanic moon in October 2001.
The images of Io are, this time, taken from much farther away but still have much scientific value. The increased distance also allowed JunoCam to take images of both Io and Europa in the same field of view.
Juno has been exploring Jupiter since 2016, and it has flown very close—and imaged—to three moons, Ganymede, Europa and Io. The images of Io are particularly important because the next two spacecraft due at Jupiter—NASA’s Europa Clipper in April 2030 and ESA’s JUpiter ICy moons Explorer (JUICE) in 2031—will focus only on Europa, Callisto and Ganymede, not Io.
It’s not certain how long JunoCam will last for. In both December and January, the camera suffered radiation damage, with an engineering issue meaning that only 44 of a planned 214 images were taken during a perijove in January. It appears that the camera overheated.
JunoCam was originally designed to operate in Jupiter’s high-energy particle environment for at least seven orbits, but has survived far longer than hoped. The $1.1 billion solar-powered spacecraft was launched on August 5, 2011 and began to orbit Jupiter on July 4, 2016.
Juno’s next perijove will occur on May 12. Orbital mechanics are making each orbit migrate slowly northward. This has given scientists a first glimpse of the polls of Jupiter up close. Its mission will be complete on September 15, 2025, when Juno will perform a “death dive” into the gas giant during its 76th perijove.
Wishing you clear skies and wide eyes.