In its almost six years of orbit around Jupiter, NASA’s Juno spacecraft has obtained valuable information about this planet and has shown us unparalleled images. Now, the US space agency has revealed a video of the most recent approach of its ship, which has come to ‘graze’ the clouds of the gas giant.
Juno maintains an elliptical orbit around Jupiter. Therefore, from time to time it passes through a point closer to this planet, which, with 140,000 kilometers in diameter, is the largest in the solar system.
On April 9, 2022, the probe made its 41st close flyby, coming within 3,300 kilometers above the chaotic clouds. By comparison, that distance is 10 times shorter than the distance between Earth and its artificial satellites in geosynchronous orbit.
The video of the approach of the probe to Jupiter
“Juno skims the cloud tops of Jupiter,” says NASA in the description of the video, which shows a sequence of images captured by the spacecraft’s camera, JunoCam, during its approach.
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According to the entity, the images show “what it would look like to travel together with the spacecraft.”
Due to the jupiter’s powerful gravity, the Juno probe accelerated to travel at 210,000 kilometers per hour during the close flyby. That’s five times faster than the Apollo missions when they left Earth for the Moon.
NASA credited the video to citizen scientist Andrea Luck, who created the animated sequence using the raw images captured by JunoCam, data that is publicly available.