Jupiter's Great Red Spot gets closest look yet from NASA's Juno spacecraft
NASA's Juno spacecraft is set to fly directly over Jupiter's Great Red Spot, the 10,000-mile storm that's raged for more than 350 years on the gas giant, according to the space agency.
The spacecraft will give humankind the first ever "up-close and personal view" of the storm, NASA said. The spacecraft will fly over the Great Red Spot shortly after 10 p.m. EDT Monday.
"Juno and her cloud-penetrating science instruments will dive in to see how deep the roots of this storm go, and help us understand how this giant storm works and what makes it so special," Scott Bolton, principal investigator of Juno from NASA's Southwest Research Institute, said in a statement.
Juno is poised to pass about 5,600 miles above the Great Red Spot's clouds. All of the spacecraft's instruments and its imager will be on during the flyby to collect as much data as possible, NASA said.
Juno was launched in 2011 and has logged 71 million miles in orbit around Jupiter. The mission has already provided scientists with a wealth of detailed findings about the giant planet, revealing a turbulent world with a complex interior, energetic polar aurora, and massive polar cyclones.
In these flyovers, the spacecraft is probing the world beneath Jupiter's cloud cover to better understand the planet's origins, structure and atmosphere.