5 years of stunning photos of Jupiter from NASA’s Juno mission

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The spacecraft was launched over 10 years ago on August 5, 2011. As it sped towards Jupiter, it took a farewell photo of Earth, proving its cameras were ready for space. .

black and white earth — The Juno spacecraft’s JunoCam captured this image of Earth as it raced past on October 9, 2011, to get a gravitational boost toward Jupiter.

Juno transmits raw data to Earth as black and white photo layers that represent red, blue, and green.

Jupiter hemisphere black and white with string of pearl storms — A raw image of Jupiter in blue, green and red, captured on August 6, 2021.

Then, Citizen Scientists merge the layers and process them to create colorful portraits. They enhance the colors to highlight different bands of Jupiter’s atmosphere, storms and clouds.

Jupiter bands of purple orange clouds with gray highs — Jupiter’s red-orange temperate north-north belt, with two gray-colored highs, May 23, 2018.

Juno’s orbit pulls it away from Jupiter, then brings it back to the planet for close flyovers. In these overflights, the spacecraft circled over Jupiter’s north pole, where eight storms raged around a giant, Earth-sized cyclone in the center.

Jupiter north pole large dark spot surrounded by eight red cyclones — A composite infrared image from the Juno probe shows cyclones at Jupiter’s north pole on February 2, 2017.

Citizen scientist Gerald Eichstädt compiled the footage of Juno into a time-lapse video of his June flyby, which took the spacecraft past Jupiter and Ganymede.

The video is three minutes and 30 seconds long, but in reality it took Juno almost 15 hours to travel the 735,000 miles from Ganymede to Jupiter, and then about three more hours to travel the poles of Jupiter.

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