Like Saturn’s moon Daphnis, NASA’s Juno spacecraft doesn’t let being an insignificant speck in a vast cosmic system deter it from its mission. That mission is to study parts of Jupiter that have never been directly seen, or certainly not imaged in the kind of detail Juno was designed to provide. Last month, the plucky little probe sailed high over the turbulent north pole of the giant planet and stored dozens of images to send back home. NASA has now posted some of them and they are simply breathtaking. The image snipped above does not do it justice:
The JunoCam imager on NASA’s Juno spacecraft snapped this shot of Jupiter’s northern latitudes on Dec. 11, 2016 at 8:47 a.m. PST (11:47 a.m. EST), as the spacecraft performed a close flyby of the gas giant planet. The spacecraft was at an altitude of 10,300 miles (16,600 kilometers) above Jupiter’s cloud tops.
This stunning view of the high north temperate latitudes fortuitously shows NN-LRS-1, a giant storm known as a Little Red Spot (lower left).
Even as science is under political attack here in the US, it marches on in other places, even on other worlds. Astronomy is undergoing a renaissance of sorts right before our eyes. Lagrange 2 may soon become the literal focal point for near and infrared astronomy with James Webb taking over from the Hubble Space Telescope. Chile has already become the place for traditional land-based optical astronomy. And, in just a few more years, the 30-meter Magellan telescope in Chile’s bone-dry Atacama desert will begin operations and the science returned from those mighty eyes is expected to be incredible.