Jupiter's Great Red Spot Fly-Over Reconstructed From PJ07 JunoCam Images

2017-07-15 23:33 UT
Credit : NASA / JPL / SwRI / MSSS / Gerald Eichstädt © cc by
Submitted By : Maquet-80
Mission Phase : PERIJOVE 7

The movie shows a 25-fold time-lapsed flight of NASA's Juno spacecraft over Jupiter's Great Red Spot on 11 July 2017. It is reconstruced from the four raw Perijove-07 JunoCam images #059, #060, #061, and #062, together with spacecraft navigation data.

The movie covers 18 real-time minutes.

The movie is composed of scenes. The stills of a single scene are rendered directly from one raw JunoCam image. The scenes are overlapping in simulated real-time. This overlap has been used to blend between scenes in a smooth way.

Besides a raw JunoCam image, a scene uses trajectory data derived from SPICE kernels, the way NASA provides spacecraft navigation data.

A raw JunoCam image essentially provides a texture. This texture can be wrapped around a model of Jupiter's rotating 1-bar MacLaurin spheroid. This kind of oblated sphere approximates Jupiter's real shape.

Together with the spacecraft trajectory and correct times, a realistic fly-over can be reconstructed.

Since Jupiter's natural colors look pretty pale, the raw colors have been strongly enhanced for this movie. This brings out detail, which would be hard to perceive without enhancement.

Rendering the video took 34 hours, running on about three CPU cores in parallel, i.e. about 100 CPU core hours.

Repetitive camera artifacts have been patched using color of nearby pixels. There are still some bright pixels left over. Some of them might be new hot CCD pixels, but most of them are more likely to be hits of energetic particles colliding with camera hardware. Rare lightning events on Jupiter are possible, too.

Most of the rendition has been performed with a proprietary software developed over the past four years. For file format conversion, including converting a series of stills into a movie, and for scence blending, the batch utility ffmpeg has been used.