Jupiter's North Equatorial Belt

Colorful swirling clouds in Jupiter's North Equatorial Belt practically fill this image from NASA's Juno spacecraft. This is the closest image captured of the Jovian clouds during this recent flyby of the gas giant planet.

The color-enhanced image was taken at 2:08 p.m. PDT (5:08 p.m. EDT) on Oct. 29, 2018 as the spacecraft performed its 16th close flyby of Jupiter. At the time, Juno was about 2,100 miles (3,400 kilometers) from the planet's cloud tops, at approximately 14 degrees north latitude. In other words, the spacecraft was about as close to Jupiter as San Francisco is to Chicago, which is quite close when racing over a planet that's 11 times wider than Earth.

Citizen scientist Björn Jónsson created this image using data from the spacecraft's JunoCam imager.

JunoCam's raw images are available at www.missionjuno.swri.edu/junocam for the public to peruse and process into image products.

More information about Juno is online at http://www.nasa.gov/juno and http://missionjuno.swri.edu.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory manages the Juno mission for the principal investigator, Scott Bolton, of Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. Juno is part of NASA's New Frontiers Program, which is managed at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, for NASA's Science Mission Directorate. Lockheed Martin Space Systems, Denver, built the spacecraft. Caltech in Pasadena, California, manages JPL for NASA.