Back on the fifth of August in 2011, NASA launched the space probe Juno to the planet Jupiter. Juno is carrying an array of scientific instruments, one of which is a special telescope/camera called JunoCam. JunoCam has a planetary-sized job and it’s not simply taking images to send back to earth.
NASA incorporated an interactive aspect to the JunoCam project for amateur astronomers and artists to participate as citizen scientists. The public voted on which areas of Jupiter were photographed.
JunoCam started sending images from the first close pass at Jupiter in November 2016 and its last close encounter was December of 2017. This last round of images, the eighth batch, is expected to be the final because the damage from intense radiation will be too great to continue operating.
NASA made the images available to the public for download and they are encouraging people to process the raw images, and then share them.
Here are three examples of the nearly 3,000 creations submitted by the public so far. Whether you decide to use complex or basic methods, NASA and Mission Juno want us to participate!
