Welcome to Discussion

In its 53-day orbit, Juno spends most of the time distant from Jupiter. The spacecraft swoops from the north to the south pole in just 2 hours, which we call a "perijove pass".  That means that the close-up images JunoCam can take are restricted to just a swath of longitude, not the entire globe.   JunoCam points out along the solar arrays, and for most perijove passes the solar arrays are oriented to the sun, so JunoCam is pointing 90 degrees from the sun.

As time goes on Juno’s orbit is moving around Jupiter.  The most distant point of the orbit is moving to Jupiter’s night side.  Perijove (“PJ”), the closest point in the orbit, is moving more to the sun-side, which impacts JunoCam because this moves Jupiter off to the side of our field of view.   A simple comparison of the images collected at PJ9 to PJ10 in the Processing gallery shows how the geometry is changing the shape of the images.

For those of you who have been participating since the beginning, we initially used this page to identify Points of Interest (POIs).  We would then vote on which POI’s to take pictures of on any given perijove pass.  This was a concept that we developed for Juno’s 14-day mission plan.   The decision to stay in a 53-day orbit means that the viewing geometry changes more and this impacts our ability to predict what will be in JunoCam’s field of view.   (To see the POI’s that were selected in the past you can go to the Voting page.)