NASA’s Juno mission reveals colors "complex" of Jupiter

Sep. 2 () –

NASA’s Juno spacecraft this week revealed the “complex” colors and structure of Jupiter’s clouds. completing its forty-third close flyby of the giant planet, which took place on July 5, 2022.

Scientist Björn Jónsson created two images using raw data from the JunoCam instrument, which was on board the spacecraft. At the time the raw image was taken, Juno was about 5,300 kilometers above the clouds of Jupiterat a latitude of about 50 degrees, and was traveling at about 209,000 kilometers per hour relative to the planet.

The first image was processed to represent the approximate colors that the human eye would see from Juno’s point of view. The second image comes from the same raw data, but in this case, Jónsson digitally processed it to increase both color saturation and contrast to sharpen small-scale features and reduce noise.

NASA highlights that this reveals some of the most “intriguing“of Jupiter’s atmosphere, including the variation in color that results from different chemical composition, the three-dimensional nature of Jupiter’s spinning vortices, and the small, bright emerging clouds that form higher in the atmosphere.