Experience Juno's final approach to Jupiter through the spacecraft's own eyes
PASADENA, Calif. -- Jupiter is getting ready for its closeup.
NASA's Juno spacecraft has been speeding through the solar system for five years in the hopes of making it into orbit around Jupiter Monday night.
A new photo and video NASA released just hours before the big event show the basketball court-sized spacecraft closing in on the huge planet.
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Juno's newest photo shows Jupiter and its four Galilean moons -- Europa, Io, Callisto and Ganymede -- as seen by the spacecraft's JunoCam instrument on June 29, when the probe was 3.3 million miles from Jupiter.
"This is the beast we're going after," Juno principal investigator Scott Bolton said while unveiling the picture during a press conference here at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).
A timelapse video also shows JunoCam's view on approach to Jupiter over the course of a couple days.
"In all of history, we’ve never really been able to see the motion of any heavenly body against another," Bolton said during another press conference Monday.
JunoCam is designed to take some of the best images of Jupiter ever captured, but its mission goes well beyond just photography.
The scientists running the instrument want to use it to get more people involved with science all over the world.
Researchers working with the mission are asking amateur astronomers to take photos of Jupiter and send them in to help the scientists identify interesting parts of Jupiter's atmosphere to study at close range during the mission.
In the fall, the team will ask people around the world to vote on what points of interest Juno should take a look at during its mission.
“Everyone in the world can be part of the JunoCam experiment," JunoCam operations engineer Elsa Jensen said at JPL on Sunday.
The JunoCam is now turned off to protect it as the $1.13 billion Juno probe attempts to get into Jupiter's orbit.
Once in orbit, Juno should beam back invaluable information about how Jupiter formed and what produces its extreme magnetic field, giving scientists more insight into the nature of our solar system and planetary formation in general.
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Miriam Kramer worked as a staff writer for Space.com for about 2.5 years before joining Mashable to cover all things outer space. She took a ride in weightlessness on a zero-gravity flight and watched rockets launch to space from places around the United States. Miriam received her Master's degree in science, health and environmental reporting from New York University in 2012, and she originally hails from Knoxville, Tennessee. Follow Miriam on Twitter at @mirikramer.
