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Birthday · July 15, 2017

Close-up of The Great Red Spot

July 15, 2017

The Earth has carried you around the Sun again, steady as ever, while the stars kept their patient watch.

Close-up of The Great Red Spot

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APOD published July 15, 2017. Full image credits are on the original APOD entry below. A publication-date match, not a photo taken on your date. Independent of NASA.

Behind the image

Close-up of The Great Red Spot

Original APOD · July 15, 2017

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.

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