Video shows what it’s like to zoom through space on NASA’s daredevil Jupiter probe
Probe looks as if it’s going to slam into the planet at the pinnacle of its highly elliptical orbit
NASA’s Juno spacecraft, which is roughly the size of a basketball court, is currently zooming around Jupiter some 600 million miles away from Earth.
And it’s taking some truly amazing photos.
A handful of pictures released by NASA show the first-ever views of Jupiter’s poles, plus wild new infrared images and audio of its auroras. The Juno mission’s leader even said the imagery “looks like nothing we have seen or imagined before.”
But there are many, many other Juno images we’re not readily seeing — so mathematician Gerald Eichstädt is continuously assembling them into a “marble movie” of Jupiter, as we learned from Emily Lakdawalla at her Planetary Society blog.
The animated video below shows the view from Juno’s only visible-light camera, called JunoCam. You can even imagine you’re riding Juno while watching it.
The “marble” of Jupiter is at the centre and its four biggest, Galilean moons — Europa, Ganymede, Io, and Callisto — are orbiting around it as brightened dots: