Hold on tight as you watch this new shot of Jupiter.
This quick view shows NASA’s perspective Juno A spacecraft flying at an altitude of 2,050 miles (3,300 km) above gas giantCloud tops on April 9th. This was Juno’s 41st flight over the radiation-spewing planet, during which the spacecraft soared to a top speed of 131,000 mph (210,000 km/h) compared to Jupiter.
NASA officials wrote in Statement (Opens in a new tab) Friday (May 27).
Related: Juno Captures Stunning Images of Jupiter’s Crescent and Ganymede
This is seven times faster than the speed International Space Station It orbits the Earth and is about five times faster than its crew Apollo missions They were traveling while they were leaving a land for the moonNASA officials said in the statement.
The color images were created from JunoCam raw images, which administrators uploaded to a file photo manipulation gallery It allows citizen scientists to add their insights to raw data.
While Juno’s initial primary target was Jupiter, in January 2021 NASA authorized an extension of the mission’s mandate to focus a bit more on planet Earth. Four big moonsEspecially Ganymede, Europa And Came. Juno will run until September 2025, assuming she is still in good health.
“With the extended mission, we will answer fundamental questions that arose during the Juno main mission as it bypassed the planet to explore the system of Jupiter’s rings and Galilean satellites,” said principal investigator Scott Bolton, of the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, at NASA. Statement (Opens in a new tab) When the extension was announced.
Radiation will likely be the main threat to the mission as it tries to continue its work over the next three years, but as long as Juno is active, it will serve as an explorer for future missions to Jupiter, the world’s largest planet. Solar System.
In the 1930s, for example, NASA Europa clipper and the European Space Agency juice A mission plan (Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer) to visit Jupiter’s moons directly.
the new James Webb Space Telescope You’ll also examine the giant planet from afar during the upcoming first cycle of observations. Webb’s work will add years of data collected under Hubble Space TelescopeThe Outer Planet Legacy Program, which seeks to study the gas giants of the solar system at least once a year on Earth.
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