National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) recently released a photograph of Jupiter which was captured by its Juno spacecraft and it shows the gas giant planet’s Great Red Spot from a different perspective.
The red spot is commonly held as the planet’s beauty mark. Previously, the images taken by Hubble telescope and the two Voyager missions revealed it to be situated below the planet’s equator. Juno, however, took the image from a different angle during its 12th close flyby of Jupiter.
NASA, in a statement, said, “This new perspective of Jupiter from the south makes the Great Red Spot appear as though it is in northern territory. This view is unique to Juno and demonstrates how different our view is when we step off the Earth and experience the true nature of our three-dimensional universe.”
“Juno took the images used to produce this color-enhanced image on April 1 between 3:04 a.m. PDT (6:04 a.m. EDT) and 3:36 a.m. PDT (6:36 a.m. EDT). At the time the images were taken, the spacecraft was between 10,768 miles (17,329 kilometers) to 42,849 miles (68,959 kilometers) from the tops of the clouds of the planet at a southern latitude spanning 34.01 to 71.43 degrees,” the statement added.
The image was produced by citizen scientists Gerald Eichstädt and Seán Doran using the data from the spacecraft’s JunoCam imager. The view is a composite of several separate JunoCam images that were re-projected, blended, and healed.
