NASA’s Juno spacecraft was a little more than one Earth diameter from Jupiter when it captured this mind-bending, color-enhanced view of the planet’s tumultuous atmosphere. Jupiter completely fills the image, with only a hint of the terminator (where daylight fades to night) in the upper right corner, and no visible limb (the curved edge of the planet).
Juno took this image of colorful, turbulent clouds in Jupiter’s northern hemisphere on Dec. 16, 2017 at 9:43 a.m. PST (12:43 p.m. EST) from 8,292 miles (13,345 kilometers) above the tops of Jupiter’s clouds, at a latitude of 48.9 degrees.
The spatial scale in this image is 5.8 miles/pixel (9.3 kilometers/pixel). Citizen scientists Gerald Eichstädt and Seán Doran processed this image using data from the Juno Cam imager.
NASA's Juno spacecraft, which arrived at Jupiter on July 4, 2016, is studying the planet in detail to give scientists a better idea of the gas giant's weather, magnetic environment and formation history.
Juno is one of NASA's three New Frontiers probes. The others are New Horizons, which flew by Pluto in 2015, and OSIRIS-REx, which is expected to fly to asteroid 101955 Bennu in 2020 to collect a sample and return it to Earth.
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