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Stunning new animation puts you aboard NASA’s robotic Juno spacecraft on its epic flyovers last month of Jupiter and the huge moon Ganymede.
On June 7, Juno zoomed in to just 1,038 kilometers (645 miles) from Ganymede, the largest moon in the solar system. It was the closest probe to the frozen and heavily cratered world since May 2000, when NASA Galileo spacecraft flew a distance of approximately 620 miles (1,000 km).
Then, on June 8, Juno made its 34th close-up over Jupiter, passing pole-to-pole in less than three hours and approaching just 2,100 miles (3,400 km) from cloud tops. restless giant planet. By this point, Jupiter’s powerful gravity had accelerated Juno to around 130,000 mph (210,000 km / h) relative to the gas giant, NASA officials said.
In picture: Juno’s incredible views of Jupiter
The probe captured some amazing photos during these back-to-back encounters, as shown in the new nearly four-minute video. He places viewers in Juno’s imaginary captain’s seat, taking us along the ride.
“The animation shows how magnificent deep space exploration can be,” said Scott Bolton, senior researcher for Juno, of the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. said in a press release.
“Animation is a way for people to imagine exploring our solar system firsthand seeing what it would be like to orbit Jupiter and fly over one of its icy moons,” added Bolton. “Today, as we approach the exciting prospect of humans visiting space orbiting Earth, it propels our imaginations decades into the future, when humans will visit the alien worlds of our solar system. ”
The Juno team performed time-lapse animation using images captured by the probe JunoCam Imager. They enlisted the help of citizen scientist Gerald Eichstädt, who generated the camera point of view for the video.
“For both worlds, JunoCam images were projected orthographically onto a digital sphere, then synthetic images were added between the actual images to make movement smoother and provide approach and departure views for Ganymede and Jupiter.” NASA officials wrote in the same statement.
There are a few other synthetic touches in the animation. For example, the team inserted simulated lightning bolts into Jupiter’s clouds, using real Juno data to make the lightning as realistic as possible.
Juno was launched in August 2011 and arrived in orbit around Jupiter in July 2016. Since then, the probe has been studying the composition, interior structure, and gravitational and magnetic fields of the giant planet, with the aim of shedding light on the formation and evolution of Jupiter and the solar system in general. He also occasionally studies the Jovian moons, as seen in Ganymede’s flyby.
Juno collects most of its data during its close flyovers of Jupiter, which typically occur every 53 Earth days. Ganymede’s close encounter changed that cadence, however: the gravity of the 3,273-mile-wide (5,268 km) moon sculpted Juno’s highly elliptical orbit such that Jupiter’s flyovers will now occur every 43. earth days. The next one will take place on July 21, NASA officials said.
Mike Wall is the author of “Over there“(Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book on the search for alien life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook.
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