Saturday 4 June 2022 07:11 AM
At its closest, Juno was just over 2,050 miles (3,300 km) above Jupiter’s colorful cloud tops, and was traveling about 131,000 miles per hour (210,000 kilometers per hour). For the planet.
“Scientist Andrea Lack created this animated sequence using raw JunoCam image data,” NASA said in a statement. These raw images are publicly available on NASA’s Mission Juno web page.
The space agency also said that during the flight, Juno was more than 10 times closer to Jupiter than the satellites in geosynchronous orbit.
It was traveling five times faster than the Apollo missions in the 1960s and 1970s when it left Earth for the moon.
Juno is a solar-powered spacecraft that spans the width of a basketball court and makes long, moving orbits around Jupiter.
Juno was launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida more than a decade ago on August 5, 2011 to study Jupiter from its orbit, and Juno will continue its investigations of the largest planet in the solar system until September 2025, or until the end of the spacecraft’s life.
Source: Technology: The Juno spacecraft flies at an altitude of only 2,000 miles above the tops of Jupiter’s cloud