Two days after NASA's Juno spacecraft streaked over Jupiter's Great Red Spot, pictures of the solar system's largest, most powerful storm, have been transmitted to Earth, giving eager scientists close-up views of the 10,000-mile-wide anticyclone where 400-mph winds have been howling for at least 187 years and possibly much longer. 
 
 The solar-powered Juno reached the low point of its 53-day orbit around Jupiter, at 9:55 p.m. EDT (GMT-4) Monday, passing within about 2,200 miles of the planet's cloud tops. Eleven-and-a-half minutes later, it made its first pass directly over the Great Red Spot at an altitude of about 5,600 miles and a velocity of some 130,000 mph. 
 
 A raw JunoCam view of the Great Red Spot. The hourglass shape of the images is an artifact of the way the camera operates as the Juno spacecraft spins in flight. NASA 
 
 The spacecraft's camera -- JunoCam -- and its eight other science instruments were all operating at close approach and the first raw, unprocessed pictures were posted on the camera website early Wednesday. 
 
 Additional processing applied to the raw images brings out much more detail that, when coupled with data from Juno's other instruments, will shed more light on the nature of the storm and presumably help answer questions that have baffled scientists for nearly two centuries if not longer. 
 
 Despite long-term observations by ground-based telescopes and a variety of spacecraft, including the Hubble Space Telescope, the Voyager probes and the Galileo orbiter, scientists still do not understand what powers the storm, how deep it extends below Jupiter's cloud tops, how long it has swirled or even the source of its reddish hue. 
 
 Likewise, no one knows why the Great Red Spot has shrunk over the past several decades, becoming more circular than oval, whether the reduction is a transient phenomenon or an indicator that the storm may be dissipating. 
 
 Processed version of an image of Jupiter's Great Red Spot created from raw images taken during Juno's flyover. NASA/Gerald Eichstädt/Seán Doran 
 
 "Not a lot is known," Scott Bolton, principal investigator with NASA's Juno probe, told CBS News in an interview Monday. "Here's the largest and most fierce storm in the entire solar system and it's lasted hundreds of years, so that's a lot different than anything else we've ever studied. 
 
 "The question is, how can it last that long? What's powering it, how's it really working inside?" 
 
 With any luck, the Juno spacecraft might may provide at least some of the answers to Bolton's questions. 
 
 While NASA's Voyager spacecraft captured spectacular zoomed-in images of the Great Red Spot during flybys in 1979, as did the Galileo orbiter in the 1990s and the Cassini probe during its voyage to Saturn, they were not nearly as close to Jupiter as Juno is at the low point of its orbit. 
 
 JunoCam is a relatively wide-angle camera intended to provide context for Juno's other instruments and it was added to the mission primarily to engage the public. Because Juno is spinning, the camera's images show thin strips of the cloudscape below that can be stitched together later to form a full picture. 
 
 Juno will make repeated passes over the Great Red Spot and "we're so close, I think we're going to blow their stuff away," Bolton said of earlier missions. "We'll see when we see it. Eventually, we'll be able to make a bit of a movie, I'm hoping, that you won't have been able to see before. We'll definitely get an up-close-and-personal view, and hopefully be able to provide something that lets the viewer feel like they're riding along." 
 
 Launched Aug. 5, 2011, the solar-powered Juno picked up a gravitational boost during a close flyby of Earth in October 2013, putting the craft on a trajectory to intersect Jupiter. Six years later, on July 4, 2016, Juno's main engine fired to put the craft into an initial 53-day polar orbit. 
 
 Mission managers originally planned to maneuver Juno into a 14-day "science orbit," but they opted not to use the main engine again because of a potential problem with the propellant pressurization system. That will stretch out the time needed to complete the mission's planned observations, but it has no impact on the quality of the data. 
 
 The unprocessed JunoCam images of the Great Red Spot are being enhanced to bring out subtle details and other data. Scientists are especially eager to learn how far down into the atmosphere the huge storm might extend. Juno's microwave radiometer can detect radiation coming from six cloud levels, allowing scientists to get an indirect view of what's going on as deep as 340 miles below the visible cloud tops. 
 
 Earlier Juno observations of other regions show "there are motions going on deep in Jupiter ... that we did not expect," Bolton said. 
 
 "Even 50 kilometers down it doesn't seem to be behaving the way we thought," he said. "Most scientists believed that as soon as you drop below the sunlit clouds and you got into where the sunlight didn't reach that everything would kind of be uniform and boring. And that's not the case. We see quite a bit of variability." 
 
 As for how deep the Great Red Spot might extend, "nobody knows," Bolton said. 
 
 "Juno's equipped to see below the cloud tops," he said. "We will compare how Jupiter looks underneath its cloud tops at different latitudes with the part where you go right over the Great Red Spot and see if it looks any different. We'll look several hundred kilometers down in this first pass." 
 
 During future passes over the Great Red Spot, Bolton said Juno will map out the gravitational field below and around the storm to find out if there might be a "blob of mass" far below the cloud tops that could play a role in the storm's persistence. 
 
 "We will not look at that on this flyby but some future one," Bolton said. "The first (pass) is just look remotely, we'll see down a few hundred kilometers. ... We'll sort of just investigate how does the veneer of Jupiter match with what's underneath. 
 
 "We'll also see the dynamics and the sheer beauty of the Great Red Spot for the first time," he added. "We'll search for lightning, signals of maybe water clouds or ammonia ice coming up through this region, we just don't know what to expect. And one of the things I've learned from Juno already, even if I thought I knew what to expect, don't believe it too much." ||||| 
 
 An artist's conception of the Juno spacecraft flying over the Great Red Spot. The image of Jupiter is not a painting — it's a mosaic made from real data taken by the Voyager spacecraft. (NASA/JPL/Björn Jónsson/Seán Doran) 
 
 Imagine a storm so vast it could swallow the Earth and so powerful that it has swirled nonstop for 350 years. That is Jupiter's Great Red Spot. 
 
 On Monday, NASA sent its Juno spacecraft skimming just 2,200 miles above the spot's roiling cloud tops. It was the closest any human-built object has come to the biggest storm in our solar system. 
 
 The plucky probe made it through without a scratch. Now, data and stunning images are streaming back to NASA, where scientists are processing the information as quickly as they can. The raw image data is available here, and anyone with the right editing software can try their hand at processing it. It will take weeks, even months, for the science data to come out, and scientists will likely study this flyby for years to come. 
 
 First JunoCam raw images of Jupiter's Great Red Spot are here! Check 'em out: https://t.co/5tqqjs8o1w pic.twitter.com/WWWbOIJqmj — Emily Calandrelli (@TheSpaceGal) July 12, 2017 
 
 The Great Red Spot has more than just good looks going for it. The massive weather system — its composition and internal dynamics are still something of a mystery — could help scientists understand weather on Earth and on worlds beyond our solar system. 
 
 NASA's Juno Mission released a video on July 5 which shows a timelapse of images taken from the Juno spacecraft between June 12 to June 29. Juno entered orbit around Jupiter on July 4 after an almost five-year journey. (NASA) 
 
 “If you just look at reflected light from an extrasolar planet, you’re not going to be able to tell what it’s made of,” Amy Simon, an expert in planetary atmospheres at the Goddard Space Flight Center, said in a NASA news release. “Looking at as many possible different cases in our own solar system could enable us to then apply that knowledge to extrasolar planets.” 
 
 Here are a few of the best processed images to come online. We will update this post with more images as they become available. 
 
 Jupiter's Great Red Spot as seen by the Juno spacecraft from Bjorn Jonsson on Vimeo. 
 
 #Juno's flyby of #Jupiter's Great Red Spot immortalized in this GIF! Watch as @NASAJuno flies over Jupiter's cloud tops and over the #GRS! pic.twitter.com/TO7oeRhWxu — Sophia Nasr (@Astropartigirl) July 12, 2017 
 
 They're here! My first processed raw map-projected image of #Jupiter's Great Red Spot from @NASAJuno's P7 flyover on July 10-11 #GRSflyover pic.twitter.com/DpSYHA7IVt — Jason Major (@JPMajor) July 12, 2017 
 
 
 
 (Tom Momary via NASA) 
 
 New @NASAJuno community images are amazing! With thanks to Gerald Eichstädt & @_TheSeaning, here's a WIP visualisation! I ❤️ the GRS. #Juno pic.twitter.com/G0JXHL6Rav — Tom Kerss (@tomkerss) July 13, 2017 
 
 
 
 (NASA / SwRI / MSSS) 
 
 
 
 (NASA / SwRI / MSSS) 
 
 #Jupiter's NNTZ Little Red Spot processed from #JunoCam raw data. An 8000km size anticyclone that has been around for more than 20yrs. pic.twitter.com/7bXD669Ecz — Damian Peach (@peachastro) July 13, 2017 
 
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 A mysterious Mars-sized planet may be hiding at the edge of our solar system ||||| On July 10, the Juno spacecraft flew just 5,600 miles above Jupiter’s most recognizable feature: the Great Red Spot. It’s a storm that’s raged for 350 years, and it’s so large it could swallow Earth whole. 
 
 And now we have our closest look at it ever. 
 
 On Wednesday, NASA released the raw images of the flyby, which you can sort through here. Like the other images Juno has sent from Jupiter, they’re stunning. 
 
 NASA creates these images by taking pictures of Jupiter with red, green, and blue filters and then processing them together for a full-color image. (It also has an infrared filter to bring out some features we couldn’t see with the naked eye.) 
 
 NASA suggests playing with the raw images to bring out certain texture and contrasts of the surface features and undulations of the various gases in Jupiter’s atmosphere. 
 
 They're here! My first processed raw map-projected image of #Jupiter's Great Red Spot from @NASAJuno's P7 flyover on July 10-11 #GRSflyover pic.twitter.com/DpSYHA7IVt — Jason Major (@JPMajor) July 12, 2017 
 
 But this mission is about more than beautiful photos. Juno has sensors that can detect magnetic fields, as well as the mass and composition of Jupiter’s atmosphere. "Now, 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, Juno’s principal investigator, said in a statement. 
 
 Juno’s observations may also shine a light on a big mystery: Why has the spot been shrinking over the decades? We won’t know until more data is processed. 
 
 In May, the journals Science and Geophysical Research Letters published the first batch of scientific findings about Jupiter from Juno’s trips there. Discoveries include enormous new cyclones swirling around the planet’s poles, a magnetic field that’s much more variable than expected, and some evidence that Jupiter’s core is not as dense and compact as once thought. Juno has been orbiting Jupiter for a year, and it will continue to do so for at least one more. 
 
 With its 67 moons, Jupiter is kind of like a mini solar system inside our own. The planet is made up of the same basic ingredients as the sun — mainly hydrogen and helium — but doesn’t have enough mass to ignite and become a star. Jupiter’s gravity is so strong, it easily captures space objects into its orbit, which is one explanation for why it has so many moons. 
 
 The hope is that Juno, in its close-up investigation of Jupiter, can reveal some history of the origin of our solar system. 
 
 For now, it’s revealing the beauty of the cosmos.
– Jupiter's Great Red Spot has never looked greater. On Monday, NASA's Juno spacecraft got closer to the giant storm than any man-made object in history, the Washington Post reports. According to CBS News, Juno came within 2,200 miles of Jupiter's clouds and 5,600 miles of the Great Red Spot itself. On Wednesday, NASA started releasing the closest photos of the storm ever taken. The images are composites of photos taken using red, green, blue, and infrared filters, Vox explains. Some of them have an hour-glass shape due to Juno's spinning. In addition to photos, Juno sent back data on Jupiter's magnetic fields, the mass and composition of its atmosphere, and more. This data will likely be studied for years. The Great Spot is the biggest storm in the solar system. Its 400mph winds have been going for nearly 200 years and likely longer than that. At 10,000 miles wide, it would cover the Earth. "Here's the largest and most fierce storm in the entire solar system and it's lasted hundreds of years," NASA's Scott Bolton tells CBS. "The question is, how can it last that long? What's powering it, how's it really working inside?" In addition to those questions, scientists hope to use the data from Juno to find out how deep the Great Red Spot goes, why it's red, and why it's been shrinking in recent decades. The answers to these questions could help us understand more about how the solar system formed and how weather works both at home and throughout the galaxy.