Fascinating NASA video lets you ride with the Juno spacecraft as it soars over Jupiter and its largest moon

NASA’s Juno spacecraft has returned photos of Jupiter to Earth since 2016, but a new video shows what the view from inside the spacecraft might look like as it flies over roaring cyclones and giant storms from Jupiter.

The images also offer a front row glimpse of Jupiter’s largest moon, Ganymede – an icy orb larger than Mercury.

Juno flew within 645 miles of Ganymede last week – the closest spacecraft to the moon for more than two decades. (The last approach was taken by NASA’s Galileo spacecraft in 2000.) Less than a day later, Juno made his 34th flyby of Jupiter, taking photos along the way.

Citizen scientist Gerald Eichstädt has compiled footage from these two trips into a time-lapse video that shows what it’s like to walk past celestial bodies. 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.

Take a look at the video below:

The start of the sequence reveals the surface of the Ganymede crater, marked by dark spots that probably form when ice passes directly from solid to gas. If you look closely you can see one of Ganymede’s largest and brightest craters, Tros, surrounded by white rays of ejected matter.

When he captured these images, Juno was moving at a speed of approximately 41,600 miles per hour. But as the spacecraft neared Jupiter, it picked up speed: the planet’s gravity accelerates Juno to nearly 130,000 miles per hour during its overflights.

The video shows Jupiter’s turbulent surface emerging from the dark abyss of space like a watercolor. White ovals indicate a set of giant storms in Jupiter’s southern hemisphere, known as the “string of pearls”. (There are five in the video.) The flashes of white light represent lightning.

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“The animation shows how magnificent deep space exploration can be,” Scott Bolton, Juno principal investigator at the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, Texas, said in a statement.

He added, “Today, as we approach the exciting prospect that humans can visit space orbiting Earth, it propels our imaginations decades into the future, when humans will visit the alien worlds of our solar system. “

Juno has already solved some of Jupiter’s mysteries

Juno flies in an elliptical orbit around Jupiter, approaching the planet once every 53 days. Its recent passage near Ganymede, however, shortened that orbit to 43 days.

The main purpose of the spacecraft is to better understand the origins and evolution of Jupiter by mapping its magnetic fields, studying its northern and northern lights (or aurora), and measuring elements of its atmosphere, including temperature, cloud movement and water concentrations.

The spacecraft entered Jupiter’s orbit in July 2016. (Jupiter is about 390 million kilometers from Earth.) Its mission was originally scheduled to end this month, but NASA has extended the lifespan of Juno until 2025.

Juno’s previous flyovers yielded important discoveries, such as the fact that most of Jupiter’s lightning is concentrated at its north pole. The spacecraft also discovered that storms tend to appear in clusters symmetrical to Jupiter’s poles and that the planet’s powerful auroras produce ultraviolet light invisible to the human eye.

Just this week, Juno’s measurements helped scientists understand why these auroras form in the first place: Electrically charged atoms, or ions, “ride” electromagnetic waves in Jupiter’s magnetic field before crashing into it. the atmosphere of the planet.

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