Close-up of The Great Red Spot
On July 11,
the Juno spacecraft once again swung near to
Jupiter's turbulent cloud tops in its looping 53 day orbit around
the Solar System's ruling gas giant.
About 11 minutes after perijove 7,
its closest approach on this orbit,
it passed directly
above Jupiter's Great Red Spot.
During the much anticipated fly over, it captured
this
close-up image data from a distance of less than 10,000 kilometers.
The
raw JunoCam data was subsequently processed by
citizen scientists.
Very
long-lived but found to be shrinking, the Solar System's
largest
storm system was measure to be 16,350 kilometers wide on
April 15.
That's about 1.3 times the diameter of planet Earth.