This close-up view of Jupiter captures the turbulent region just west of the Great Red Spot in the South Equatorial Belt, with resolution better than any previous pictures from Earth or other spacecraft.
NASA's Juno spacecraft captured this image with its JunoCam citizen science instrument when the spacecraft was a mere 5,400 miles (8,700 kilometers) above Jupiter's cloudtops on Dec. 11, 2016 at 9:14 a.m. PT (12:14 p.m. ET). Citizen scientist Sergey Dushkin produced the sublime color processing and cropped the image to draw viewers' eyes to the dynamic clouds.
JunoCam's raw images are available at www.missionjuno.swri.edu/junocam for the public to peruse and process into image products.
NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory manages the Juno mission for the principal investigator, Scott Bolton, of Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. Juno is part of NASA's New Frontiers Program, which is managed at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, for NASA's Science Mission Directorate. Lockheed Martin Space Systems, Denver, built the spacecraft. Caltech in Pasadena, California, manages JPL for NASA.
More information about Juno is online at http://www.nasa.gov/juno and http://missionjuno.swri.edu.