A JunoCam close-up

While many people were gearing up to observe this month’s total solar eclipse, NASA’s Juno spacecraft last month grabbed an up-close look at another solar-system icon, Jupiter’s Great Red Spot. Juno entered a highly elliptical polar Jovian orbit on 5 July 2016. At each lap’s perijove, the point of closest approach to the gas planet, the probe comes within just 3400 km of Jupiter’s cloud tops. On its seventh orbit, eleven and a half minutes after perijove on 10 July 2017, Juno’s path passed 9866 km above the Great Red Spot, and one of the probe’s instruments, JunoCam, captured the 16 350-km-diameter roiling storm.

The JunoCam imager was included in the Juno payload specifically for education and public engagement. Its red, green, and blue filters span the visible spectrum. Due to data-volume limitations, JunoCam can take only a limited number of images on each flyby. So the mission team chooses individual targets with public input and then posts the raw image data on the mission’s website. “Citizen scientists” are encouraged to download the images, process and analyze them, and upload the results.

Shown here is a color-enhanced image of the Great Red Spot created from the JunoCam data by Kevin Gill at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. To try your own hand at Jovian image analysis, go to https://www.missionjuno.swri.edu/junocam . (Image by NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS/SwRI/ Kevin M. Gill © CC BY.)

To submit candidate images for Back Scatter visit http://contact.physicstoday.org .