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Sunday, July 30, 2017

JUPITER - Wow! This Is What Jupiter's Great Red Spot Would Look Like to You

Wow! This Is What Jupiter's Great Red Spot Would Look Like to You:

This true-color image shows what Jupiter’s Great Red Spot would look like to a human observer from the position of NASA’s Juno Jupiter orbiter. Citizen scientist Björn Jónsson created the photo using data from Juno’s JunoCam imager.

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/Björn Jónsson

If you'd been riding aboard NASA's Juno probe when it zoomed over Jupiter's famous Great Red Spot earlier this month, this is what you would have seen.

A newly released photo gives a dramatic look at that July 10 close pass, capturing Juno's view of the enormous storm from an altitude of just 8,648 miles (13,918 kilometers).

"This true-color image offers a natural-color rendition of what the Great Red Spot and surrounding areas would look like to human eyes from Juno's position," NASA officials wrote in an image description Thursday (July 27). "The tumultuous atmospheric zones in and around the Great Red Spot are clearly visible."

The image was created by citizen scientist Björn Jónsson using data collected by Juno's JunoCam imager. NASA encourages anyone who wishes to process JunoCam raw images to do so; go to www.missionjuno.swri.edu/junocam for more information.

The $1.1 billion Juno mission launched in August 2011 and arrived in orbit around Jupiter on July 4, 2016. The probe is zooming around the huge planet on a highly elliptical path, making close approaches, or "perijoves," once every 53.5 days.

Juno is investigating Jupiter's composition and interior structure, with the aim of helping scientists better understand the gas giant's formation and evolution. The probe collects most of its data during perijove passes like the July 10 event, seven of which it has completed so far (not counting the initial one on July 4 of last year, when Juno's science gear was turned off).

Juno's mission is scheduled to last until at least February 2018.

The Great Red Spot has been raging for centuries. The huge storm is about 10,000 miles (16,000 km) wide, meaning it's bigger than the entire Earth. However, it used to be even bigger; the Great Red Spot has long been shrinking, for reasons that scientists don't entirely understand.

Follow Mike Wall on Twitter @michaeldwall and Google+. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook or Google+. Originally published on Space.com.

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The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is the United States government agency responsible for the civilian space program as well as aeronautics and aerospace research. President Dwight D. Eisenhower established the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in 1958 with a distinctly civilian (rather than military) orientation encouraging peaceful applications in space science. The National Aeronautics and Space Act was passed on July 29, 1958, disestablishing NASA's predecessor, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA). The new agency became operational on October 1, 1958.

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The Oxford English Dictionary defines a UFO as "An unidentified flying object; a 'flying saucer'." The first published book to use the word was authored by Donald E. Keyhoe. The acronym "UFO" was coined by Captain Edward J. Ruppelt, who headed Project Blue Book, then the USAF's official investigation of UFOs. He wrote, "Obviously the term 'flying saucer' is misleading when applied to objects of every conceivable shape and performance. For this reason the military prefers the more general, if less colorful, name: unidentified flying objects. UFO (pronounced Yoo-foe) for short." Other phrases that were used officially and that predate the UFO acronym include "flying flapjack", "flying disc", "unexplained flying discs", "unidentifiable object", and "flying saucer". The phrase "flying saucer" had gained widespread attention after the summer of 1947. On June 24, a civilian pilot named Kenneth Arnold reported seeing nine objects flying in formation near Mount Rainier. Arnold timed the sighting and estimated the speed of discs to be over 1,200 mph (1,931 km/h). At the time, he described the objects' shape as being somewhat disc-like or saucer-like, leading to newspaper accounts of "flying saucers" and "flying discs". In popular usage the term UFO came to be used to refer to claims of alien spacecraft. and because of the public and media ridicule associated with the topic, some investigators prefer to use such terms as unidentified aerial phenomenon (or UAP) or anomalous phenomena, as in the title of the National Aviation Reporting Center on Anomalous Phenomena (NARCAP).

UFO PHOTO PHOTOGRAPHY

UFO - Unidentified Flying Object An unidentified flying object, or UFO, in its most general definition, is any apparent anomaly in the sky that is not identifiable as a known object or phenomenon. Culturally, UFOs are associated with claims of visitation by extraterrestrial life or government-related conspiracy theories, and have become popular subjects in fiction. While UFOs are often later identified, sometimes identification may not be possible owing to the usually low quality of evidence related to UFO sightings (generally anecdotal evidence and eyewitness accounts). Stories of fantastical celestial apparitions have been told since antiquity, but the term "UFO" (or "UFOB") was officially created in 1953 by the United States Air Force (USAF) to serve as a catch-all for all such reports. In its initial definition, the USAF stated that a "UFOB" was "any airborne object which by performance, aerodynamic characteristics, or unusual features, does not conform to any presently known aircraft or missile type, or which cannot be positively identified as a familiar object." Accordingly, the term was initially restricted to that fraction of cases which remained unidentified after investigation, as the USAF was interested in potential national security reasons and/or "technical aspects" (see Air Force Regulation 200-2). During the late 1940s and through the 1950s, UFOs were often referred to popularly as "flying saucers" or "flying discs". The term UFO became more widespread during the 1950s, at first in technical literature, but later in popular use. UFOs garnered considerable interest during the Cold War, an era associated with a heightened concern for national security. Various studies have concluded that the phenomenon does not represent a threat to national security nor does it contain anything worthy of scientific pursuit (e.g., 1951 Flying Saucer Working Party, 1953 CIA Robertson Panel, USAF Project Blue Book, Condon Committee).