Watch a wonderful NASA flyby video of Jupiter and its moon Ganymede

In June, NASA’s Juno spacecraft made spectacular celestial tours with a close flyby of the largest moon in the solar system, Jupiter’s Ganymede. He followed that triumph with a flyby of the gas giant itself. NASA took footage of these adventures and created a video from the point of view of the “spaceship captain” which is truly amazing.

It’s a beautiful mix of science, space exploration and cinematic magic. The video uses footage from the spacecraft’s JunoCam mapped to digital models to create a seamless hover animation.

The video perspective is designed to make you feel like you’re aboard Juno, which has been exploring Jupiter since 2016 and earlier this year received a mission extension until the end of 2025. The expansion includes a new focus on the fascinating moons of the gas giant. This is where Ganymede comes in.

The sequence begins with Juno approaching Ganymede where he passed within 645 miles (1,038 kilometers) of the surface. It then zooms in on Jupiter and the swirling and fiery thunderstorms exposed to it. Look for simulated lightning.

A musical score by Vangelis (see Blade Runner) was the perfect choice to accompany the flyby video.

“The animation shows how magnificent deep space exploration can be,” Juno principal investigator Scott Bolton said of the Southwest Research Institute in a NASA statement this week. “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.”

If I had to sum it up in one word: magnificent.

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