NASA has released the first photo taken by the Juno spacecraft’s camera. The photo consists of several images that the JunoCam sent to Earth. The JunoCam was turned on six days after arriving at Jupiter, on July 10 to be precise.
The image proves that the JunoCam at least survived the journey and the first flight through the extremely high radiation from Jupiter, NASA writes. The photo for the world to see was taken on July 10 at 5:30 PM utc. At that time, the spacecraft was far from the planet and its moons, namely 4.3 million kilometers.
Juno is in an elliptical orbit around Jupiter and it takes 53.5 days to orbit the entire ellipse. At the time the photo was taken, the probe was moving away from the planet. In total, Juno orbits the planet 37 times before finally burning up in a controlled manner in Jupiter’s atmosphere.
This is the first photo released by NASA. In the near future, the organization wants to publish more photos, but the first high-resolution photo will not be taken until August 27. At that time Juno is only 4100 kilometers from the planet for the second time.
Image: NASA. From left to right: Jupiter, Io, Europa and Ganymede.