The Mote in God's Eye: Jupiter Edition

Crop of an image from NASA: Juno’s Close Look at the Little Red Spot


The JunoCam imager on NASA’s Juno spacecraft snapped this shot of Jupiter’s northern latitudes on Dec. 11, 2016 at 8:47 a.m. PST (11:47 a.m. EST), as the spacecraft performed a close flyby of the gas giant planet. The spacecraft was at an altitude of 10,300 miles (16,600 kilometers) above Jupiter’s cloud tops. 

This stunning view of the high north temperate latitudes fortuitously shows NN-LRS-1, a giant storm known as the Little Red Spot (lower left). This storm is the third largest anticyclonic reddish oval on the planet, which Earth-based observers have tracked for the last 23 years. An anticyclone is a weather phenomenon with large-scale circulation of winds around a central region of high atmospheric pressure. They rotate clockwise in the northern hemisphere, and counterclockwise in the southern hemisphere. The Little Red Spot shows very little color, just a pale brown smudge in the center. The color is very similar to the surroundings, making it difficult to see as it blends in with the clouds nearby. Citizen scientists Gerald Eichstaedt and John Rogers processed the image and drafted the caption.

JunoCam's raw images are available at www.missionjuno.swri.edu/junocam for the public to peruse and process into image products.

JPL manages the Juno mission for the principal investigator, Scott Bolton, of Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. Juno is part of NASA's New Frontiers Program, which is managed at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, for NASA's Science Mission Directorate. Lockheed Martin Space Systems, Denver, built the spacecraft. Caltech in Pasadena, California, manages JPL for NASA.


More information about Juno is online at http://www.nasa.gov/juno and http://missionjuno.swri.edu.


Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/Gerald Eichstaedt/John Rogers

The reason for posting isn't so much the science of it but the gorgeous immensity of this gigantic beast of a planet.  Imagine being in orbit around Jupiter with that seething image filling the sky because you're so close to it.  Can our minds even grasp being in the physical presence of such a colossal entity of any kind.  It seems many might flip and bounce around the room from the feeling of that power.