Juno Sends Back Breathtaking New Images of Jupiter
Juno Launched in August 2011 from Cape Canaveral, Florida, aboard an Atlas V 551 rocket, and arrived in orbit around Jupiter in July 2016.
The space probe is in a polar orbit around the giant planet, and the majority of each orbit is spent well away from the planet.
credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / SwRI / MSSS / Kevin M. Gill.
But, once every 53 days, Juno’s trajectory approaches Jupiter from above its north pole, where it begins a 2-hr transit — from pole to pole — flying north to south.
During these flybys, the spacecraft is probing beneath the obscuring cloud cover of the planet and studying its auroras to learn more about its origins, structure, atmosphere and magnetosphere.
