"While it may underwhelm a little"
That was my first thought, but I like the augmented reality filter that adds the names of the moons it's looking at. The next one will have Pokemon Go characters.
NASA has released the first images captured by the Juno probe. The space agency says the image below was captured on July 10th from a distance of “4.3 million kilometers … on the outbound leg of its initial 53.5-day capture orbit.” The probe's “JunoCam”, a colour, visible-light camera, collected the image. While it may …
@Wilkinson
Your pictures are obviously a hoax. There are no stars in the background. Clearly you made that in your garage to fool the world.
Joking aside, that is a kick ass photo!
Darn, you guessed it. I also did the lunar landings in the same garage (when I was 7)
Where has that tinfoil hat of mine gone
Juno is orbiting in the long cycles for a couple of years. Some of these pictures will be uber impressive. Most of what it does will be non-visual, though. NASA is trying to resolve much about Jupiter's liquid/solid middle. They want to find out much more about its magnetosphere, too.
It'll drop the highest point in it's orbit (apojove) to pretty much circularise pretty soon afaik. It's in a very eliptical orbit right now as it only barely managed to get captured before starting to move too far away from Saturn again (Oberth effect means engine efficiency is much greater deeper in the gravity well). Thus once the craft is confirmed operational and all distant observations of the moons have been made it'll fire it's engine when aproaching perijove one last time to drop the apojove and shorten it's orbit time.
(And yes, I just wanted to use apojove and perijove, because I'm a nerd)
Actually Juno will remain in a highly elliptical orbit in order to stay clear of Jupiter's immensely powerful radiation fields. It will gather data when it is close to Jupiter then get out of Dodge before any serious damage to the spacecraft can happen.
But while I'm looking forward to the first new (and maybe better) pictures of Jupiter in decades, It makes me smile a little more to look at the pictures sent back by the intrepid Voyager probe with its ancient 1970s technology, which is still hanging in there after so many years. A relic from a different, more innocent time in every way.