It's been a busy and
exhilarating couple of months for scientists who study Jupiter— and space nerds
fascinated by the gas giant. Yesterday, a team of researchers
announced the discovery of 12 new Jovian moons, bringing Jupiter's total up to
79. Last week, scientists revealed that data from NASA's $1 billion Juno
mission suggested there may be a previously undiscovered volcano on Jupiter's
moon Io.
And last month, the team
behind Juno figured out that Jupiter's lighting is more similar to Earth's than
previously thought — which solved a 39-year-old mystery.
But most excitingly, NASA
confirmed in June that Juno, which has orbited Jupiter since July 2015, will
cheat death for at least three more years. The probe was scheduled to crash
into Jupiter's clouds this month, but instead the mission has been extended
until at least July 2021. That gives scientists a chance to complete the
mission's main goal: to map Jupiter's magnetic and gravitational fields.
This work is done by flying
Juno over Jupiter's cloud tops at speeds roughly 75 times as fast as a bullet.
These flybys, called perijoves, happen once every 53.5 days. The most recent
one (Juno's 14th perijove) occurred on July 16, and the prior flyby was on May
24.
The high-speed trips have
allowed NASA to document the gas giant like never before. An optical camera
called JunoCam captures beautiful images of Jupiter each time, and the space
agency uploads the raw photo data to its websites. Then people around the world
can download that data and process it into stunning color pictures.
Here are mesmerizing images
from the latest perijove, along with a few highlights from past flybys.
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