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NASA’s Juno Spacecraft Sends First In-orbit View

173 points by srikar 10y ago

tomlock 10y ago
Here's a non-paywall link about the photo if anyone wants it: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-07-13/juno-nasa-spacecraft-sends-back-first-images-of-jupiter/7624916 http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-07-13/juno-nasa-spacecraft-s...
- tdy721 10y ago
  Wait what? If you're seeing that NASA.gov has a paywall, you need to take a close look at your (very infected) PC... I now see that the link has been edited/changed Carry on!
csl 10y ago
I'm always wondering if such images are in false color. Does anyone know about this one?
- Sanddancer 10y ago
  JunoCam's full color -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JunoCam https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JunoCam
wigster 10y ago
seems very blurry. Hopefully sharper ones to come.
- rimantas 10y ago
  But don't expect any images better than Galileo sent. Camera was not a priority for Juno.
  - andyjohnson0 10y ago
    There is some basic info on the vehicle and its payload at [1]. "The spacecraft will also carry a color camera, called JunoCam, to provide the public with the first detailed glimpse of Jupiter's poles." - so like you say, not a priority. More on JunoCam at [2]. [1] https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/juno/spacecraft/index.html https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/juno/spacecraft/index.htm... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JunoCam https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JunoCam
- nacnud 10y ago
  Yep, Juno's orbit will take it much closer than this, so we should expect more interesting photos in about a month's time.
- jessriedel 10y ago
  This photo was taken from 2.7M miles, and Juno will approach closer than 3,000 miles of the cloud tops, so you can expect the resolution to get roughly 9 thousand times better.
cornholio 10y ago
I understand JunoCam is a public outreach tool. But if it provides much worse resolution than Hubble from inside Jupiter's orbit, it's basically useless even for that. I don't know if the cam is the problem or the transmission bandwidth, one thing is clear, when serios science starts there will be much less bandwidth available to send sharp and cool photos. That's what you get from a solar powered probe. We waste billions of dollars and unique opportunities because some people have gotten in their minds that RTG power is evil and dangerous. NASA even canceled the ASRG, based on the Stirling engine, which was 5 times more efficient in terms of radioactive material and would have allowed powering probes for the whole solar system. Imagine a Pluto rover !
- nacnud 10y ago
  Juno is in a highly elliptical orbit, which will take it within 5000km of Jupiter's cloud tops. This photo was taken from much further away than that. In short, check back in about a month. :)
  - azernik 10y ago
    Agreed, and to add more detail for comparison - the current distance is around 2 million kilometers, so resolution should jump by a factor of about 500 (per dimension, not number of pixels) at closest range. EDIT: For a comparison to Hubble - at closest approach JunoCam will get 5 kilometers per pixel [1], while Hubble gets in the region of 120 kilometers per pixel [2]. So, giant jump in quality, though the field of view from up close will be limited. [1] http://planetary.org/blogs/emily-lakdawalla/2011/3133.html http://planetary.org/blogs/emily-lakdawalla/2011/3133.html [2] http://www.spacetelescope.org/images/heic0910q/ http://www.spacetelescope.org/images/heic0910q/
    - jessriedel 10y ago
      Current distance is 2.7 million miles, or 4.3 million km, according to the NY Times caption.
- dredmorbius 10y ago
mixedmath 10y ago
> On later orbits, Juno will continue photographing the poles, but where else the camera will focus will be open to a popular vote by the public. NASA has been pretty active in public outreach. The article indicates that Juno takes something like 4 photos an hour. I wonder whether it will be 1 photo for the public to 3 photos for science, or totally different?
- flippyhead 10y ago
  Yeah I hand't realized they did this. Pretty cool! I hope the boaty mcboatface people don't get wind of it. They might crash it into the big red spot!
- raverbashing 10y ago
  JunoCam is not there for science, but rather for public outreach.
KnightOfWords 10y ago
Glad Juno has made it and appears to be working OK. Not the most amazing image, better ones are routinely taken by amateurs from earth, but the crescent can only be seen by going there as Jupiter lies outside our orbit. We'll see much closer views from Juno when it's moved to a closer orbit in October. I came across this on Reddit the other day, taken with a smartphone and 8" telescope: https://www.reddit.com/r/astrophotography/comments/4kegyv/smartphone_jupiter_w_grs/ https://www.reddit.com/r/astrophotography/comments/4kegyv/sm...
- jacquesm 10y ago
  That's 400 stacked images, but still, very impressive.
- drzaiusapelord 10y ago
  >Stacked 400 best in Autostackert This isn't a photo. It a photoshop fiction of 400 different photos blended together. There's a big difference between that and a single frame from a spacecraft. Comparing the two seems silly.
  - KnightOfWords 10y ago
    Hardly fictional, it's a pretty accurate representation of what Jupiter actually looks like. The main reason for using this technique is because our turbulent atmosphere blurs any image. Taking a video allows only a small percentage of the clearest frames to be combined. A spacecraft doesn't have this problem. The technique is called lucky imaging: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucky_imaging https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucky_imaging Stacking improves signal-to-noise ratio but does not introduce details that aren't present. A stacked image can be more accurate than a single frame as camera artifacts are reduced.
    - zodPod 10y ago
      Really well said! Also, before reading your explanation, I was a little hazy on how the image stacking thing worked. Now I understand a lot better. It's like averaging to get all of the details to the forefront without the oddities!
jsingleton 10y ago
This is cool. Jupiter is easy to spot with the naked eye, as it's the second brightest object in the night sky after Venus (obviously, excluding the moon when lit). You can even see some of its moons with some basic optics. To think there is a probe there now is a pretty powerful image to inspire children. Something we couldn't do with the recent Pluto visit, as awesome as that was.
- chiph 10y ago
  On a visit with the nieces, I took the eldest outside and using a night sky tracker app, pointed it out to her. "You know what that is?" {teenager sigh}"no. A star?" "No, that's a planet. It's Jupiter." She got a little more interested after that, but a career in astro-anything wasn't to be, looks like.
- ceejayoz 10y ago
  A six-inch scope in your backyard gets you this: https://www.flickr.com/photos/ceejayoz/26513799722/in/album-72157667505352545/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/ceejayoz/26513799722/in/album-... My daughter's massively into space, and having a mid-size telescope (Celestron NexStar 6SE) has been truly wonderful. There's something really different about seeing it for yourself even if the picture isn't as good as one from a probe.
  - Buttons840 10y ago
    I was camping under a clear sky with friends and asked, "has anyone seen another planet with their own eyes?" and explained I meant seen any detail through a telescope. Nobody had. I resolved start some amature astronomy then. Any suggestions on how to start?
    - ceejayoz 10y ago
      The sidebar of https://www.reddit.com/r/astronomy https://www.reddit.com/r/astronomy has a bunch of useful articles on getting started. Just be warned that it's one of those hobbies that can get really expensive if you lack impulse control - "I need a new eyepiece! And a few more inches of aperture! And a better mount!" starts to pile up if you really enjoy it. :-D
e12e 10y ago
From NASA (no paywall, more info on mission): https://www.nasa.gov/feature/jpl/nasa-s-juno-spacecraft-sends-first-in-orbit-view https://www.nasa.gov/feature/jpl/nasa-s-juno-spacecraft-send...
- sctb 10y ago
  Thanks, we updated the link from http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/13/science/juno-sends-first-image-back-while-orbiting-jupiter.html http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/13/science/juno-sends-first-i....
neals 10y ago
Are we going to get amazing Pluto-like images, like that chilling closeup? They really impressed me A LOT. Or is Jupiter close enough for us to already know enough about its surface?
- jessriedel 10y ago
  Jupiter either doesn't have a solid surface, or it lies very deep inside (like 4/5ths of the way to the center). So there isn't any surface to see, just clouds. Juno will be passing within 3,000 miles of the tops of Jupiter's clouds. Since Jupiter's radius is 43,000 miles, it will fill the entire frame. The only question is how high-quality the camera is. The camera is for public relations only (no science) and I don't know the resolution. But this photo was taken from 2.7M miles, so you can expect the resolution to get roughly 9 thousand times better. EDIT: > Jupiter itself will only appear to be 75 pixels across from JunoCam when Juno reaches the furthest point of its orbit around the planet. At its closest approaches JunoCam could achieve 15 km/pixel resolution from 4300 km, while Hubble has taken images of up to 119 km/pixel from 600 million km....The camera uses a Kodak image sensor, the KODAK KAI-2020, capable of color imaging at 1600 x 1200 pixels. It has a field of view of 18 x 3.4 degrees with three filters to provide color imaging. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JunoCam https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JunoCam
  - chaitanya 10y ago
    > At its closest approaches JunoCam could achieve 15 km/pixel resolution from 4300 km In comparison, the highest resolution photos of Pluto from New Horizons achieved 80 meters per pixel from a closest approach of 12500 km. Its amazing how good the camera was on New Horizons. https://www.nasa.gov/feature/new-horizons-best-close-up-of-plutos-surface https://www.nasa.gov/feature/new-horizons-best-close-up-of-p...
    - jessriedel 10y ago
      No doubt New Horizon's camera was phenomenal for the mission, but I'm actually not sure how good it was compared to something you could do with a terrestrial lens. (There are lots of compromises when you go to space.) Juno's camera is very modest by design: It's a wide-field of view and only a few megapixels, so basically a cell-phone camera.
kchoudhu 10y ago
I understand the importance of this mission, but after the Curiosity skycrane, the Pluto flyby and the Rosetta orbiter, I'm really jonesing for something cool. What else is in the pipeline?
- hipviz 10y ago
  Solar Probe Plus will fly within 8.5 solar radii of the Sun into the hottest region of the sun, the corona, approaching speeds of 200 km/s and withstanding temperatures of 1400C. We don't know why the corona of the sun is hotter than the surface of the sun. SPP will provide data to help us to better understand and create better models of coronal heating and the solar wind. [1] http://solarprobe.jhuapl.edu/science/index.php http://solarprobe.jhuapl.edu/science/index.php
- peter303 10y ago
  SpaceX might launch a Mars lander during the 2018 low energy window. Though I am guessing more likely the 2020 window following that. NASA is fully cooperating with SpaceX by doing things like providing detailed data of previous Mars landings. NASA is SpaceX largest customer and financier. Many ex-NASA people workmat SpaceX. These data are public. But it helps to have good communication channels.
  - drzaiusapelord 10y ago
    >SpaceX might launch a Mars lander during the 2018 low energy window. Is this budgeted? Is it on a launch docket? Is there a rocket ready for it? Is the lander completed? 2018 is right around the corner and frankly I'm getting sick of "Spacex might" comments. There's a big difference between "might" and "do." When you see a mission on the NASA roster, its ready to go and unless there's some serious technical issue, it'll happen. I'd like to see more "do" from SpaceX that isn't LEO flights and landing on barges.
    - ceejayoz 10y ago
      Elon Musk time means "2018" is almost certainly going to be 2020 or 2022 (even with NASA's promise of technical support). That said, "landing on barges" is potentially a massive step towards reusable, cheap launch vehicles, and it's one their competitors mocked them for even attempting.
GonzoBytes 10y ago
I am astonished that humans can do this technology. Here I am looking at these pics a flying robot snapped from 4M+ km away from Jupiter?! I wish they mark these pics with some pictographs regarding the scale of things. Like something comparing the orbital distances between the moons and Jupiter itself to that of Earth's orbital distance to the Sun or something. I cannot comprehend 4 million kilometers (which I know is Juno's distance to Jupiter, not the moons' orbital distance..). I have trouble wrapping my mind around just 4 km.
- ceejayoz 10y ago
  For scale, Io is almost the same distance from Jupiter as the Moon is from Earth - about 400,000 kilometers. That's about 0.3% the distance of Earth to the Sun. For a good sense of how enormous these differences are, try the video "Riding Light" - https://vimeo.com/117815404 https://vimeo.com/117815404 - Jupiter shows up at the 43:10 mark (Earth's at 8:17, for size comparison).

173 points by srikar 10y ago

Here's a non-paywall link about the photo if anyone wants it: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-07-13/juno-nasa-spacecraft-sends-back-first-images-of-jupiter/7624916 http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-07-13/juno-nasa-spacecraft-s...

tdy721 10y ago
Wait what? If you're seeing that NASA.gov has a paywall, you need to take a close look at your (very infected) PC... I now see that the link has been edited/changed Carry on!

csl 10y ago

I'm always wondering if such images are in false color. Does anyone know about this one?

Sanddancer 10y ago
JunoCam's full color -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JunoCam https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JunoCam

wigster 10y ago

seems very blurry. Hopefully sharper ones to come.

rimantas 10y ago
But don't expect any images better than Galileo sent. Camera was not a priority for Juno.
- andyjohnson0 10y ago
  There is some basic info on the vehicle and its payload at [1]. "The spacecraft will also carry a color camera, called JunoCam, to provide the public with the first detailed glimpse of Jupiter's poles." - so like you say, not a priority. More on JunoCam at [2]. [1] https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/juno/spacecraft/index.html https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/juno/spacecraft/index.htm... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JunoCam https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JunoCam
nacnud 10y ago
Yep, Juno's orbit will take it much closer than this, so we should expect more interesting photos in about a month's time.
jessriedel 10y ago
This photo was taken from 2.7M miles, and Juno will approach closer than 3,000 miles of the cloud tops, so you can expect the resolution to get roughly 9 thousand times better.

cornholio 10y ago

I understand JunoCam is a public outreach tool. But if it provides much worse resolution than Hubble from inside Jupiter's orbit, it's basically useless even for that. I don't know if the cam is the problem or the transmission bandwidth, one thing is clear, when serios science starts there will be much less bandwidth available to send sharp and cool photos. That's what you get from a solar powered probe. We waste billions of dollars and unique opportunities because some people have gotten in their minds that RTG power is evil and dangerous. NASA even canceled the ASRG, based on the Stirling engine, which was 5 times more efficient in terms of radioactive material and would have allowed powering probes for the whole solar system. Imagine a Pluto rover !

nacnud 10y ago
Juno is in a highly elliptical orbit, which will take it within 5000km of Jupiter's cloud tops. This photo was taken from much further away than that. In short, check back in about a month. :)
- azernik 10y ago
  Agreed, and to add more detail for comparison - the current distance is around 2 million kilometers, so resolution should jump by a factor of about 500 (per dimension, not number of pixels) at closest range. EDIT: For a comparison to Hubble - at closest approach JunoCam will get 5 kilometers per pixel [1], while Hubble gets in the region of 120 kilometers per pixel [2]. So, giant jump in quality, though the field of view from up close will be limited. [1] http://planetary.org/blogs/emily-lakdawalla/2011/3133.html http://planetary.org/blogs/emily-lakdawalla/2011/3133.html [2] http://www.spacetelescope.org/images/heic0910q/ http://www.spacetelescope.org/images/heic0910q/
  - jessriedel 10y ago
    Current distance is 2.7 million miles, or 4.3 million km, according to the NY Times caption.
dredmorbius 10y ago

mixedmath 10y ago

> On later orbits, Juno will continue photographing the poles, but where else the camera will focus will be open to a popular vote by the public. NASA has been pretty active in public outreach. The article indicates that Juno takes something like 4 photos an hour. I wonder whether it will be 1 photo for the public to 3 photos for science, or totally different?

flippyhead 10y ago
Yeah I hand't realized they did this. Pretty cool! I hope the boaty mcboatface people don't get wind of it. They might crash it into the big red spot!
raverbashing 10y ago
JunoCam is not there for science, but rather for public outreach.

KnightOfWords 10y ago

Glad Juno has made it and appears to be working OK. Not the most amazing image, better ones are routinely taken by amateurs from earth, but the crescent can only be seen by going there as Jupiter lies outside our orbit. We'll see much closer views from Juno when it's moved to a closer orbit in October. I came across this on Reddit the other day, taken with a smartphone and 8" telescope: https://www.reddit.com/r/astrophotography/comments/4kegyv/smartphone_jupiter_w_grs/ https://www.reddit.com/r/astrophotography/comments/4kegyv/sm...

jacquesm 10y ago
That's 400 stacked images, but still, very impressive.
drzaiusapelord 10y ago
>Stacked 400 best in Autostackert This isn't a photo. It a photoshop fiction of 400 different photos blended together. There's a big difference between that and a single frame from a spacecraft. Comparing the two seems silly.
- KnightOfWords 10y ago
  Hardly fictional, it's a pretty accurate representation of what Jupiter actually looks like. The main reason for using this technique is because our turbulent atmosphere blurs any image. Taking a video allows only a small percentage of the clearest frames to be combined. A spacecraft doesn't have this problem. The technique is called lucky imaging: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucky_imaging https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucky_imaging Stacking improves signal-to-noise ratio but does not introduce details that aren't present. A stacked image can be more accurate than a single frame as camera artifacts are reduced.
  - zodPod 10y ago
    Really well said! Also, before reading your explanation, I was a little hazy on how the image stacking thing worked. Now I understand a lot better. It's like averaging to get all of the details to the forefront without the oddities!

jsingleton 10y ago

This is cool. Jupiter is easy to spot with the naked eye, as it's the second brightest object in the night sky after Venus (obviously, excluding the moon when lit). You can even see some of its moons with some basic optics. To think there is a probe there now is a pretty powerful image to inspire children. Something we couldn't do with the recent Pluto visit, as awesome as that was.

chiph 10y ago
On a visit with the nieces, I took the eldest outside and using a night sky tracker app, pointed it out to her. "You know what that is?" {teenager sigh}"no. A star?" "No, that's a planet. It's Jupiter." She got a little more interested after that, but a career in astro-anything wasn't to be, looks like.
ceejayoz 10y ago
A six-inch scope in your backyard gets you this: https://www.flickr.com/photos/ceejayoz/26513799722/in/album-72157667505352545/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/ceejayoz/26513799722/in/album-... My daughter's massively into space, and having a mid-size telescope (Celestron NexStar 6SE) has been truly wonderful. There's something really different about seeing it for yourself even if the picture isn't as good as one from a probe.
- Buttons840 10y ago
  I was camping under a clear sky with friends and asked, "has anyone seen another planet with their own eyes?" and explained I meant seen any detail through a telescope. Nobody had. I resolved start some amature astronomy then. Any suggestions on how to start?
  - ceejayoz 10y ago
    The sidebar of https://www.reddit.com/r/astronomy https://www.reddit.com/r/astronomy has a bunch of useful articles on getting started. Just be warned that it's one of those hobbies that can get really expensive if you lack impulse control - "I need a new eyepiece! And a few more inches of aperture! And a better mount!" starts to pile up if you really enjoy it. :-D

e12e 10y ago

From NASA (no paywall, more info on mission): https://www.nasa.gov/feature/jpl/nasa-s-juno-spacecraft-sends-first-in-orbit-view https://www.nasa.gov/feature/jpl/nasa-s-juno-spacecraft-send...

sctb 10y ago
Thanks, we updated the link from http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/13/science/juno-sends-first-image-back-while-orbiting-jupiter.html http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/13/science/juno-sends-first-i....

neals 10y ago

Are we going to get amazing Pluto-like images, like that chilling closeup? They really impressed me A LOT. Or is Jupiter close enough for us to already know enough about its surface?

jessriedel 10y ago
Jupiter either doesn't have a solid surface, or it lies very deep inside (like 4/5ths of the way to the center). So there isn't any surface to see, just clouds. Juno will be passing within 3,000 miles of the tops of Jupiter's clouds. Since Jupiter's radius is 43,000 miles, it will fill the entire frame. The only question is how high-quality the camera is. The camera is for public relations only (no science) and I don't know the resolution. But this photo was taken from 2.7M miles, so you can expect the resolution to get roughly 9 thousand times better. EDIT: > Jupiter itself will only appear to be 75 pixels across from JunoCam when Juno reaches the furthest point of its orbit around the planet. At its closest approaches JunoCam could achieve 15 km/pixel resolution from 4300 km, while Hubble has taken images of up to 119 km/pixel from 600 million km....The camera uses a Kodak image sensor, the KODAK KAI-2020, capable of color imaging at 1600 x 1200 pixels. It has a field of view of 18 x 3.4 degrees with three filters to provide color imaging. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JunoCam https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JunoCam
- chaitanya 10y ago
  > At its closest approaches JunoCam could achieve 15 km/pixel resolution from 4300 km In comparison, the highest resolution photos of Pluto from New Horizons achieved 80 meters per pixel from a closest approach of 12500 km. Its amazing how good the camera was on New Horizons. https://www.nasa.gov/feature/new-horizons-best-close-up-of-plutos-surface https://www.nasa.gov/feature/new-horizons-best-close-up-of-p...
  - jessriedel 10y ago
    No doubt New Horizon's camera was phenomenal for the mission, but I'm actually not sure how good it was compared to something you could do with a terrestrial lens. (There are lots of compromises when you go to space.) Juno's camera is very modest by design: It's a wide-field of view and only a few megapixels, so basically a cell-phone camera.

kchoudhu 10y ago

I understand the importance of this mission, but after the Curiosity skycrane, the Pluto flyby and the Rosetta orbiter, I'm really jonesing for something cool. What else is in the pipeline?

hipviz 10y ago
Solar Probe Plus will fly within 8.5 solar radii of the Sun into the hottest region of the sun, the corona, approaching speeds of 200 km/s and withstanding temperatures of 1400C. We don't know why the corona of the sun is hotter than the surface of the sun. SPP will provide data to help us to better understand and create better models of coronal heating and the solar wind. [1] http://solarprobe.jhuapl.edu/science/index.php http://solarprobe.jhuapl.edu/science/index.php
peter303 10y ago
SpaceX might launch a Mars lander during the 2018 low energy window. Though I am guessing more likely the 2020 window following that. NASA is fully cooperating with SpaceX by doing things like providing detailed data of previous Mars landings. NASA is SpaceX largest customer and financier. Many ex-NASA people workmat SpaceX. These data are public. But it helps to have good communication channels.
- drzaiusapelord 10y ago
  >SpaceX might launch a Mars lander during the 2018 low energy window. Is this budgeted? Is it on a launch docket? Is there a rocket ready for it? Is the lander completed? 2018 is right around the corner and frankly I'm getting sick of "Spacex might" comments. There's a big difference between "might" and "do." When you see a mission on the NASA roster, its ready to go and unless there's some serious technical issue, it'll happen. I'd like to see more "do" from SpaceX that isn't LEO flights and landing on barges.
  - ceejayoz 10y ago
    Elon Musk time means "2018" is almost certainly going to be 2020 or 2022 (even with NASA's promise of technical support). That said, "landing on barges" is potentially a massive step towards reusable, cheap launch vehicles, and it's one their competitors mocked them for even attempting.

GonzoBytes 10y ago

I am astonished that humans can do this technology. Here I am looking at these pics a flying robot snapped from 4M+ km away from Jupiter?! I wish they mark these pics with some pictographs regarding the scale of things. Like something comparing the orbital distances between the moons and Jupiter itself to that of Earth's orbital distance to the Sun or something. I cannot comprehend 4 million kilometers (which I know is Juno's distance to Jupiter, not the moons' orbital distance..). I have trouble wrapping my mind around just 4 km.

ceejayoz 10y ago
For scale, Io is almost the same distance from Jupiter as the Moon is from Earth - about 400,000 kilometers. That's about 0.3% the distance of Earth to the Sun. For a good sense of how enormous these differences are, try the video "Riding Light" - https://vimeo.com/117815404 https://vimeo.com/117815404 - Jupiter shows up at the 43:10 mark (Earth's at 8:17, for size comparison).