Close up of the Great Red Spot

Astronomy Picture of the Day · 2017-07-15 · NASA (public domain)

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Close up of the Great Red Spot — APOD for 2017-07-15

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.

Astronomy Picture of the Day for 2017-07-15 — image & explanation courtesy of NASA (public domain), mirrored at Tukuk-OS for reading and search convenience.

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