Viral: Stunning video of Jupiter captured by Juno spacecraft

International

oi-Deepika S

Washington, Jun 04: National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has shared a video on Instagram which gives a glimpse of gas giant Jupiter.

At the point of closest approach, NASA’s Juno spacecraft was just over 2,050 miles (3,300 kilometers) above the colorful clouds, traveling about 1,31,000 mph (210,000 kilometers per hour) relative to Jupiter.

“On April 9, 2022, NASA’s Juno spacecraft completed its 41st close flyby of Jupiter. Its JunoCam instrument captured what it would look like to skim the cloud tops of the GasGiant. The animated sequence shown above was created by Citizen Scientist Andrea Luck, who used raw JunoCam image data,” NASA posted on Instagram.

Jupiter is the fifth planet from the Sun and the largest in the Solar System. It is a gas giant with a mass more than two and a half times that of all the other planets in the Solar System combined, but slightly less than one-thousandth the mass of the Sun.

Jupiter is the third brightest natural object in the Earth’s night sky after the Moon and Venus, and it has been observed since prehistoric times. It was named after the Roman god Jupiter, the king of the gods.