NASA Juno Spacecraft Captures Footage of Jupiter’s Clouds During a Flyby

The NASA Juno spacecraft successfully completed its 41st close flyby of Jupiter, and its JunoCam instrument captured clouds swirling atop the gas giant. The footage – compiled by citizen scientist Andrea Luck into a short animation – gives us a glimpse of what it would be like to ride along with the spacecraft.

Spanning approximately 87,000 miles (140,000 kilometers) in diameter, Jupiter is the largest known planet in the solar system. When Juno made its closest approach on April 9, the spacecraft was just about 2,050 miles (3,300 kilometers) above Jupiter’s painting-like cloud tops. It was estimated to be traveling at around 131,000 miles per hour (210,000 kilometers per hour) relative to the planet. It also zipped by Ganymede recently, one of Jupiter’s moons.

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By comparison, at closest approach Juno was more than 10 times closer to Jupiter than satellites in geosynchronous orbit are to Earth, traveling at a speed about five times faster than the Apollo missions did when they left Earth for the Moon,” said the agency.