The long-awaited close-ups of Jupiter’s Great Red Spot have arrived from NASA’s Juno orbiter, and they’re spectacular.
Juno has been orbiting the giant planet for more than a year, but last weekend’s flyby was the closest that the probe came to the solar system’s most famous superstorm. The JunoCam imager captured data from as little as 2,200 miles above the cloud tops, and the probe flew directly over the Great Red Spot at a distance of 5,600 miles.
It took a couple of days for the data to be transmitted and distributed, but today, image-processing wizards around the world got their chance to work their magic on the 10,000-mile-wide spot.
