NASA launches Flyby from Jupiter created with the Juno probe’s camera

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NASA’s Juno spacecraft has made more than twenty flights of Jupiter and its largest moon, Ganymede, and now you can view it from the viewpoint of a “spaceship captain.”

Juno performed the closest flight to Ganymede in more than two decades on June 7. Less than a day later, she made the 34th flight from Jupiter. It flew from one pole of the planet to the other and did so in less than three hours, and you can watch that flyby from the viewpoint of the “starship captain” below.

Now, the video is absolutely stunning but it’s important to note that it’s actually a set of images taken by the Juno probe’s camera split up with artificial frames to create the video you see above.

“The animation shows how beautiful deep space exploration can be,” said Scott Bolton, Juno principal investigator of the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. “The animation is a way for people to imagine exploring our solar system up close by seeing what it would be like to orbit Jupiter and fly over one of its icy moons.”

NASA says the three-and-a-half-minute video animation “begins as Juno approaches Ganymede, passing 645 miles (1,038 km) from the surface at a relative speed of 41,600 mph (67,000 kph). When watching the animation, you’ll notice Some dark areas NASA says is believed to be the result of “the sublimation of ice in the surrounding void, leaving behind dark remnants.”

NASA Black Hole Exhibit

You can also see a truss pit, which is Ganymede’s largest and brightest scar.

“It takes just 14 hours and 50 minutes for Juno to travel the 735,000 miles (1.18 million km) between Ganymede and Jupiter, and views are teleported to just 2,100 miles (3,400 km) above Jupiter’s stunning cloud tops,” NASA says. “At this point, Jupiter’s strong gravity has accelerated the spacecraft to approximately 130,000 mph (210,000 km/h) relative to the planet.”

According to NASA, the video shows Jupiter’s polar cyclones at the North Pole and five “String of Pearls,” eight large storms that appear as white ovals and rotate counterclockwise in the planet’s southern hemisphere.

For more info on Jupiter, check out this story about a metallic asteroid that flies somewhere between Mars and Jupiter and is valued at $10,000 quadrillion dollars (don’t worry – that number hurts our brains too) Then check out these beautiful close-ups NASA revealed Jupiter year 2018.

Wesley LeBlanc is a freelance news writer, science expert, and guide maker for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @LeBlancWes.

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