February 26, 2018
You were born into motion: oceans turning, continents drifting, clouds forming, planets circling, galaxies wheeling through the dark.
Passing Jupiter
Birthday · February 26, 2018
A little universe, just for you
Your date.
Ready to give.
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APOD published February 26, 2018 · Video still. Full image credits are on the original APOD entry below. A publication-date match, not a photo taken on your date. Independent of NASA.
Here comes Jupiter! NASA's robotic spacecraft Juno is continuing on its 53-day, highly-elongated orbits around our Solar System's largest planet. The featured video is from perijove 11, the eleventh time Juno has passed near Jupiter since it arrived in mid-2016. This time-lapse, color-enhanced movie covers about four hours and morphs between 36 JunoCam images. The video begins with Jupiter rising as Juno approaches from the north. As Juno reaches its closest view -- from about 3,500 kilometers over Jupiter's cloud tops -- the spacecraft captures the great planet in tremendous detail. Juno passes light zones and dark belt of clouds that circle the planet, as well as numerous swirling circular storms, many of which are larger than hurricanes on Earth. After the perijove, Jupiter recedes into the distance, now displaying the unusual clouds that appear over Jupiter's south. To get desired science data, Juno swoops so close to Jupiter that its instruments are exposed to very high levels of radiation.