Monday, August 8, 2011

What Juno Will See at Jupiter's South Pole


This simulated view of the south pole of Jupiter illustrates the unique perspective of NASA's Juno mission. The spacecraft's polar orbit will allow Juno's camera, called JunoCam, to image Jupiter's clouds from a vantage point never accessed by other spacecraft.

JunoCam was designed to return the best-ever images of Jupiter's pole. It has a 58-degree-wide field of view encompassing the entire polar region. The view illustrated here simulates an image taken 40 minutes before Juno's closest approach to Jupiter. At closest approach, JunoCam's images of Jupiter's cloudtops will have a resolution better than 3.1 miles (5 kilometers).

Illustration credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Malin Space Science Systems

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