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Jupiter's Swirling Cloudscape

Aug 30, 2018
Intricate swirls in Jupiter's volatile northern hemisphere are captured in this image from NASA's Juno spacecraft. Bursts of scattered bright-white 'pop-up' clouds appear with some visibly casting shadows on the neighboring cloud layers beneath them.

Intricate swirls in Jupiter's volatile northern hemisphere are captured in this color-enhanced image from NASA's Juno spacecraft. Bursts of bright-white "pop-up" clouds appear scattered throughout the scene, with some visibly casting shadows on the neighboring cloud layers beneath them. Juno scientists are using shadows to determine the distances between cloud layers in Jupiter's atmosphere, which provide clues to their composition and origin.

This image was taken at 10:27 p.m. PDT on May 23, 2018 (1:27 a.m. EDT on May 24) as the spacecraft performed its 13th close flyby of Jupiter. At the time, Juno was about 7,050 miles (11,350 kilometers) from the planet's cloud tops, above a northern latitude of approximately 49 degrees.

Citizen scientists Gerald Eichstädt and Seán Doran 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.

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