Notes about cylindrical maps and perijove passes
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.)
General Comments
334 Comments
The Dolphin-shaped clouds seen in one set of Juno images are forms which may be precursors of forms in life in fluid media even on Earth. Other similar relationships, then, may be discovered, which would involve phenomena such as diffusion, m*c^2=h*nu, heat and thermodynamics, concentration gradients and so on.
I'd like to see these spots:
Whispy dark cloud -7.452°, 338.976°
Beethoven-60 69.786°, 83.7°
Would love to have an explanation of planning and work that went into the planning and acquisition of perijove 27 image 40 where Io is captured in partial occultation by Jupiter.
We got amazingly lucky! The timing of this image was not deliberate...