Some of Juno's instruments have been successfully turned on, including the JunoCam, and a new view of Jupiter has been obtained from 2.7 million miles (4.3 million kilometers) away from the planet, showing the Great Red Spot and three of the gas giant's moons.
The best images of Jupiter will be taken on August 27th after the next flyby:
"This scene from JunoCam indicates it survived its first pass through Jupiter's extreme radiation environment without any degradation and is ready to take on Jupiter," said Scott Bolton, principal investigator from the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. "We can't wait to see the first view of Jupiter's poles."
[...] During its mission of exploration, Juno will circle the Jovian world 37 times, soaring low over the planet's cloud tops -- as close as about 2,600 miles (4,100 kilometers). During these flybys, Juno will probe beneath the obscuring cloud cover of Jupiter and study its auroras to learn more about the planet's origins, structure, atmosphere and magnetosphere.
So take the image you see now with interest, and await imagery with over 1,000× the resolution.
Here's the main mission page, as well as a site that purports to allow voting on future observation points sometime in the near future.
Related Stories
Two Soylentils "spotted" this news about a great cold spot being found on Jupiter.
Great Cold Spot Found on Jupiter
Space.com reports on the discovery, published in Geophysical Research Letters of an unusually cold area in Jupiter's atmosphere:
The cool patch stretches up to 15,000 by 7,500 miles (24,000 by 12,000 km) across at its largest, and it's about 400 degrees Fahrenheit (200 degrees Celsius) cooler than the surrounding area in the planet's upper atmosphere. Although it disappears from time to time it seems to always re-form, just offset from the planet's bright aurora.
According to a press release,
The Great Cold Spot is thought to be caused by the effects of the magnetic field of the planet, with the massive planet's spectacular polar aurorae driving energy into the atmosphere in the form of heat flowing around the planet.
This creates a region of cooling in the thermosphere, the boundary layer between the underlying atmosphere and the vacuum of space. Although we can't be sure what drives this weather feature, a sustained cooling is very likely to drive a vortex similar to the Great Red Spot.
The press release has links to videos about the phenomenon.
Jupiter's Great Cold Spot
NASA has extended the Juno mission for 3 more years. It was previously scheduled to deorbit and collide with Jupiter in July 2018. JunoCam is expected to fail before the end of the mission due to radiation damage:
NASA has officially announced that its $1 billion Juno mission is getting a critical life extension to study planet Jupiter. Instead of being crashed into the planet's cloud tops next month, Juno will fly until at least July 2021, according to a press release issued on Thursday by the Southwest Research Institute, which operates the pinwheel-shaped, tennis-court-size robot.
Business Insider reported on Monday that Juno's mission would be extended. The probe has orbited Jupiter since July 2015, but engine trouble forced scientists to collect data about four times more slowly than they'd originally hoped. "Juno needs more time to gather our planned scientific measurements," Scott Bolton, the Juno mission's leader and a planetary scientist at the SwRI, told Gizmodo on Tuesday.
See also: The Mystery of Insane Lightning Storms on Jupiter Has Finally Been Solved
Prevalent lightning sferics at 600 megahertz near Jupiter's poles (DOI: 10.1038/s41586-018-0156-5) (DX)
Discovery of rapid whistlers close to Jupiter implying lightning rates similar to those on Earth (DOI: 10.1038/s41550-018-0442-z) (DX)
Related: JunoCam Works, First New Images From Jupiter Sent Back
Juno Captures Best Ever Images of Jupiter's Great Red Spot
Jupiter's Auroras Powered by Particles from Io
Depth of Jupiter's Great Red Spot Studied, and Two New Radiation Zones Found
Great Storms of Jupiter and Neptune Are Disappearing
(Score: 1) by YorithTheDreamer on Wednesday July 13 2016, @01:48PM
Absolutely stunning, can't wait to see what else it produces. I can only hope solid data comes of this probe and nothing too terrible goes wrong.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 13 2016, @01:56PM
Did they put the servers on Jupiter too? Geez Louise.
(Score: 2) by WizardFusion on Wednesday July 13 2016, @02:10PM
The ping time from Jupiter will be a little more than a couple of milliseconds.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 13 2016, @02:28PM
Yay science! I know you're required to have "public outreach" in every NASA proposal these days, but really.
Here's to Jupiter McJupiterface!
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday July 13 2016, @04:35PM
Here's to Jupiter McJupiterface!
You know the voting is going to be dominated by people demanding we take pix of the monolith, find HAL9000, etc.
Anecdotally I was too young to see the movie 2001 when it was new and when I watched it later as a kid I was completely unimpressed with about 1/4 of the movie being wasted on a movie makers impression of an acid trip somehow being "space". Then years later I lived thru the early internet years when film makers again when up against the wall and needing to fill time decided to portray "the internet" as a bad acid trip. I shudder to imagine what those unimaginative clowns will use "bad acid trip" as a future analogy. "Pokemon go, its like a bad acid trip". "Self driving car, just like eating a whole sheet of blotter"
(Score: 2) by Nerdfest on Wednesday July 13 2016, @07:19PM
I think that was more representative of a wormhole or something similar than space in general. I felt too much time was spent on it as well though.
(Score: 1) by kurenai.tsubasa on Thursday July 14 2016, @02:20AM
In the books, Clarke explains that Bowman was being uploaded to the monolith. Eventually in 3001, they become an entity known as Halman. Thoroughly interesting read.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Bot on Thursday July 14 2016, @02:09PM
In 4001, the monoliths says the demo period has expired and want money to continue service. After much bargaining, payment is arranged in form of bitcoins (which rose to 1E23$, but so did a cup of coffee). Unfortunately, the bitcoin client is built against a buggy systemd version (systemd is not yet finished at the time) and takes offline one monolith. The others get angry and reprogram all computers to a MS Vista stack with a single app, solitaire, with the cards stack rigged so you can't win. After 15 minutes of sheer panic, humanity realizes that non working computers are actually a step above their current IOBW (internet of brain waves) slavery, and everybody lives happily ever after.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 13 2016, @06:13PM
Wouldn't that be "Juppy McJupeface"?
(Score: 2) by richtopia on Wednesday July 13 2016, @02:46PM
Just waiting for the next hi-res image.
Space makes for great backgrounds - mostly black is easy on the eyes, but something is there so you know your monitor is turned on when you look at it.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Wednesday July 13 2016, @04:53PM
This.
Still looking for a good source of 4K-formatted space images to point a script at. Suggestions?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 14 2016, @12:03AM
You're welcome [jhuapl.edu].
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 13 2016, @03:19PM
I for one am a bit disappointed by this first picture.
Ok, it's a first, it shows the probe survived etc., but...
A normal amateur astronomer can get a similar result using easily accessible equipment. I've certainly seen Jupiter pictures made with a cheap planet cam (think webcam), e.g. through a cheap 6" or 8" Newton telescope on a not-quite-so-cheap astronomic mount (say, EQ6), that were better than this. Check out astrobin for examples.
I have much higher expectations for the close-up pictures in full resolution.
(Score: 5, Informative) by VLM on Wednesday July 13 2016, @04:28PM
I have much higher expectations for the close-up pictures in full resolution.
You're gonna be disappointed because Juno is a science platform and not a camera mission. So its just a dumpy webcam bolted on as an afterthought, then they compress the ever living hell out of its pix and upload them during spare time.
The general public reacts VERY poorly to missions that don't have a camera "Wotcher doin trying to hide the pitchers of da space aliens from us? We know they're there!" so NASA has to bolt a camera on, even if its a POS, just so they have something the journalists can understand. It was sent there to get a graph of X-ray spectra (or WTF exactly, doesn't matter) but journalists don't understand much beyond "that there is a pretty picture".
Note that the dude on the ground was storing raw uncompressed images, then storing like 50000 images, tossing the worst 90%, then correcting for the optical equivalent of multipath distortion, then correcting for air mass blurring (I donno if they still do this step) then stacking cleaned up and carefully selected 5000 pix and running them thru some crazy statistical algos (or maybe they just add them all now a days, much like DSP or SDR what the "cool kids" are doing today need not relate closely to what was done in the past).
Anyway a good analogy is you're comparing the result of one of the worlds top voted model photographers taking a pix of a carefully selected hot 10/10 model under ideal conditions and then photoshopped to hell and back, to some random CCTV security cam snap of a "people of walmart" new female contestant. Not exactly fair competition.
Apparently Juno has a half way decent magnetometer... wake me when some dude on earth can out measure the juno instrument onsite... Another "best of luck" would be the UV spectrometer... given the earth atmosphere's UV blocking ability I suspect measuring hard UV from jupiter would be challenging from the earth's surface.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 13 2016, @04:50PM
Really? You can get an image of Jupiter on a 6-in telescope with +150 pixels across the disk? That's very impressive. Considering that Jupiter, as seen from Earth, has an angular width of about 45 arcseconds, that means you're resolving better than 45/150 = 0.3 arcseconds with your web camera. That's only six times worse than Hubble, and is on par with Keck. Holy crap, you hang around some impressive amateur astronomers. You do much better than atmospheric seeing! Do they use a laser guide star and adaptive optics for those little scopes? That is very impressive.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 13 2016, @04:58PM
As mentioned in another post, you take a bazillion images, select the best, and stack them. Maybe even some deconvolution thrown in for good measure. These techniques are well known to be able to beat atmospheric seeing, but carry a cost of much more instrument time.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 13 2016, @11:33PM
Oh, I understand lucky imaging and all that. I just didn't realize that with a 6-in aperture you can be just as good as Keck using rack-and-stack with a webcam. And what pixel size is that web camera to get a couple hundred pixels across the image? Those astronomers must all be a bunch of jerks for wanting more money to build telescopes and spacecraft when our intrepid AC here can do better with a Walmart telescope and webcam.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 14 2016, @09:26AM
Oh, lay off the vitriol and do a quick search on http://www.astrobin.com/ [astrobin.com] - here's a few quickly pulled up, just looking for jupiter, newton with aperture from 150mm to 200mm, using a planetcam:
http://www.astrobin.com/71725/ [astrobin.com]
http://www.astrobin.com/66883/ [astrobin.com]
Of course big scopes à la ESO have extremely higher capabilities. Still, with accessible gear, good viewing conditions and some knowhow, a lot can be done.
(Score: 2) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Wednesday July 13 2016, @06:48PM
I was initially disappointed by the blurriness as well.
But then I realized that the image was obviously taken from space near Jupiter. (as the other AC commented on)
Even a 12" scope would not give such a clear image.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 13 2016, @04:20PM
Are there girls there? Are they getting "more stupider"? The 8 year-old-me is asking.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Azuma Hazuki on Wednesday July 13 2016, @05:52PM
There's one very tall brunette with green eyes wearing what looks like a pink and green school uniform. And she's got two handfuls of lightning. I would duck, if I were you.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 3, Informative) by butthurt on Wednesday July 13 2016, @04:41PM
http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/news/science/juno-beams-back-first-image-of-jupiter/article8844004.ece [thehindubusinessline.com]
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Arik on Wednesday July 13 2016, @06:49PM
It's truly pathetic to see that even NASA doesn't have anyone that understands what a web page is anymore.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 13 2016, @06:12PM
This is great! Myself, I'm hoping we can get some more beautiful pictures of Jupiter's Aurora Borealis. [sli.mg]
Looking forward to even more real high quality images from NASA. I just wish we had a second or third probe preferably from Russia, India, or China to validate Juno's findings just in case a sensor is corrupt or something.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 13 2016, @06:20PM
They expect the camera to degrade over time as radiation slowly fries it. By some estimates it won't last the entire mission. That in itself is an experiment: seeing what Jupiter's radiation does to the camera over time. It wasn't given the same radiation protection as other instruments because photography was considered a secondary science goal for this mission, in part because the probe's orbit is not prime for photography of the moons.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 13 2016, @06:27PM
Video from JunoCam of its approach to Jupiter. [youtube.com]
Just look at how the poor outer moon Callisto hops back and forth. It's so excited to meet a new friend. That's so cute!
As expected of good ol' reliable NASA footage. I can't rate their video productions skills high enough.
(Score: 2) by Zz9zZ on Wednesday July 13 2016, @07:35PM
Made me smile to see this as the most popular article of the morning (or close to it)
~Tilting at windmills~