MEDIA GALLERY : Jupiter Approach

jump to gallery selection

JUPITER APPROACH

NASA/JPL is excited to share the unprocessed images that comprise the approach movie acquired by JunoCam as the Juno spacecraft approached Jupiter.

Collection of the images began ~3 weeks before Juno fired its engines to slow down and be captured into orbit around Jupiter. One red/green/blue image was taken every 15 minutes.  Over 1,300 still images were acquired over a ~17-day period, then put together very much in a flip book-like fashion to create the Juno Approach Movie. 

Imaging from June 12 to June 29 allowed us to see Jupiter’s moon Callisto make one complete orbit around Jupiter. The other 3 large moons (Io, Europa and Ganymede) make multiple orbits and can be seen entering and exiting Jupiter’s shadow.

Below you will find links to view and download the movie, the individual still frames, and other useful information for the purpose of processing these images on your own. We hope that you will enjoy creating your own product!
JUNO APPROACH MOVIE OF JUPITER AND THE GALILEAN MOONS
NASA's Juno spacecraft captured a unique time-lapse movie of the Galilean satellites in motion about Jupiter. The movie begins on June 12th with Juno 10 million miles from Jupiter, and ends on June 29th, 3 million miles distant. The innermost moon is volcanic Io; next in line is the ice-crusted ocean world Europa, followed by massive Ganymede, and finally, heavily cratered Callisto. Galileo observed these moons to change position with respect to Jupiter over the course of a few nights. From this observation he realized that the moons were orbiting mighty Jupiter, a truth that forever changed humanity's understanding of our place in the cosmos. Earth was not the center of the Universe. For the first time in history, we look upon these moons as they orbit Jupiter and share in Galileo’s revelation. This is the motion of nature's harmony.

NASA/JPL

APPROACH STILL IMAGE FRAMES (ZIPs OF RAW IMAGES)

This image was the last acquired by JunoCam before all the instruments were powered off in preparation for the Jupiter Orbit Insertion burn.  At the start of the movie, Jupiter was 13 pixels across in the JunoCam field of view, and 40 pixels across by the end.  The famous Great Red Spot, a storm that has been swirling for centuries, is clearly visible in this last image, acquired at a distance of 5.3 million km on June 29.  

Due to the way each image had to be acquired, each still in this movie is a long strip composed of 82 frames, with each frame measuring 128 pixels tall.  The Juno spacecraft spins at 2 Revolutions Per Minute (RPM) – each JunoCam image spans one entire rotation.  The stills were acquired in the red, green, and blue spectral bands for each frame.  The end result is an image that contains each of these frames vertically stacked on top of one another.  This is standard for every JunoCam image. 

Click on the links below to download ZIP files containing the raw individual photos captured by JunoCam. Because it is quite large, the entire package has been subdivided into 5 ZIPs, each around 500 MB.
Download 1 of 5 Download 2 of 5 Download 3 of 5 Download 4 of 5 Download 5 of 5 Download Metadata Package

TECHNICAL IMAGE DESCRIPTION   

Like previous Malin Space Science Systems (MSSS) cameras (e.g., Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter’s Mars Color Imager) JunoCam is a "pushframe" imager. The detector has multiple filter strips, each with a different bandpass, bonded directly to its photoactive surface. Each strip extends the entire width of the detector, but only a fraction of its height; JunoCam's filter strips are 1600 pixels wide and about 155 rows high. The filter strips are scanned across the target by spacecraft rotation.  At the nominal spin rate of 2 RPM, frames are acquired about every 400 milliseconds. JunoCam has four filters: three visible (red/green/blue) and a narrowband "methane" filter centered around 890 nm (not used for the approach movie). 

For exposures longer than ~3.2 milliseconds, the spacecraft spin rate will cause more than a pixel's worth of image blurring. For the illumination conditions at Jupiter, such short exposures will result in unacceptably low Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR), so the camera provides Time-Delayed-Integration (TDI). TDI vertically shifts the image one row each 3.2 milliseconds over the course of the exposure, canceling the scene motion induced by rotation. While still maintaining the needed frame rate for frame-to-frame overlap, up to ~100 TDI steps can be used for image timing. 

For further details, see the JunoCam Technical paper at: http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11214-014-0079-x

Three sets of image parameter settings were used as the spacecraft approached Jupiter.  The first day, June 12, had a lower data volume than the subsequent days of the movie so images were not acquired as frequently.  In the final set we reduced the TDI to avoid over-exposing Jupiter.  All images were acquired in Jpeg compression.  The movie was interrupted 3 times for other spacecraft activities.

The final three images feature the Great Red Spot (all images were acquired in lossless compression): 
     2016-06-29T20:25:00:  First image, TDI of 1
     2016-06-29T20:28:00:  Second image, TDI of 2
     2016-06-29T20:32:00:  Third image, TDI of 1