Are we going to get amazing Pluto-like images, like that chilling closeup? They really impressed me A LOT. Or is Jupiter close enough for us to already know enough about its surface?
Jupiter either doesn't have a solid surface, or it lies very deep inside (like 4/5ths of the way to the center). So there isn't any surface to see, just clouds.
Juno will be passing within 3,000 miles of the tops of Jupiter's clouds. Since Jupiter's radius is 43,000 miles, it will fill the entire frame. The only question is how high-quality the camera is.
The camera is for public relations only (no science) and I don't know the resolution. But this photo was taken from 2.7M miles, so you can expect the resolution to get roughly 9 thousand times better.
EDIT:
> Jupiter itself will only appear to be 75 pixels across from JunoCam when Juno reaches the furthest point of its orbit around the planet. At its closest approaches JunoCam could achieve 15 km/pixel resolution from 4300 km, while Hubble has taken images of up to 119 km/pixel from 600 million km....The camera uses a Kodak image sensor, the KODAK KAI-2020, capable of color imaging at 1600 x 1200 pixels. It has a field of view of 18 x 3.4 degrees with three filters to provide color imaging.
> At its closest approaches JunoCam could achieve 15 km/pixel resolution from 4300 km
In comparison, the highest resolution photos of Pluto from New Horizons achieved 80 meters per pixel from a closest approach of 12500 km. Its amazing how good the camera was on New Horizons.
No doubt New Horizon's camera was phenomenal for the mission, but I'm actually not sure how good it was compared to something you could do with a terrestrial lens. (There are lots of compromises when you go to space.) Juno's camera is very modest by design: It's a wide-field of view and only a few megapixels, so basically a cell-phone camera.
> It's a wide-field of view and only a few megapixels, so basically a cell-phone camera.
It's not similar to a cell phone camera at all. Cell phone cameras are usually much higher resolution (current iPhone is 8 megapixels vs the 2 for Juno), but with a much smaller sensor (iPhone cam has a 1.5µm pixel size vs 7.4µm for Juno).
Also light thresholds need to be taken into consideration. Jupiter is 5x[1] further from the Sun then Earth, so there is much less light to capture in an image.
It's the opposite of cellphone camera. It has low megapixels and a large sensor size. This will allow a lot of light onto the sensor and it won't suffer from the noisiness that high megapixels on a smaller sensor suffer from.
Resolution has very little to do with it. Many images from NASA are stitched, even the ones from New Horizons. The important part is light sensitivity (in the correct wavelengths!) and making sure that it can work in the radiation of Jupiter.
You can go buy a camera with the same sensor if you'd like, but they're expensive:
I believe it's the same sensor that flew on the Curiosity mission and we all know those photos are fantastic. They are also flight tested, invaluable for missions like this where you only get one shot at it.
In fact I believe Juno has ice-penetrating radar, intended to probe for the mythical surface. We may be seeing images of its real surface for the first time soon
I do not believe radar is part of the instrument set.
There is a "gravity sensor" which is really, I think, an extremely careful Doppler measurement which will allow us to infer the mass distribution within Jupiter.
>Are we going to get amazing Pluto-like images, like that chilling closeup?
No. The camera on Juno was literally an after thought. Originally it wasn't even going to have one. It's main job is studying magnetic fields and radiation belts.
Yes, the optical-wavelength camera was not a science driver for Juno. It's just making images of cloud tops. The cloud tops aren't that interesting, it's what's going on underneath or beyond.
In addition to fields and radiation instruments you mention, there are two other imaging spectrographs, one an IR instrument and one in UV. The IR camera can look ~70 km down below the cloud tops.
Importantly, there is a microwave radiometer, which can peer ~500km beneath the clouds to determine atmospheric composition as a function of time and space.
They have put Juno in a polar orbit, so it will scan the atmosphere through dozens of orbits before the radiation kills the instruments.
We should get some extraordinary views of Jupiter's polar aurora activity. Also much higher resolution of gas dynamics phenomena because of Juno's perijove altitude of ~3,000 miles.
Doubt we'll see depth, unless it's through fortuitous breaks in high clouds. Other (non-imaging) instruments (microwave sounders, etc.) will tell us what's going on in Jupiter's interior. Metallic hydrogen? Rocky core? Juno may tell us.
Juno will be passing within 3,000 miles of the tops of Jupiter's clouds. Since Jupiter's radius is 43,000 miles, it will fill the entire frame. The only question is how high-quality the camera is.
The camera is for public relations only (no science) and I don't know the resolution. But this photo was taken from 2.7M miles, so you can expect the resolution to get roughly 9 thousand times better.
EDIT:
> Jupiter itself will only appear to be 75 pixels across from JunoCam when Juno reaches the furthest point of its orbit around the planet. At its closest approaches JunoCam could achieve 15 km/pixel resolution from 4300 km, while Hubble has taken images of up to 119 km/pixel from 600 million km....The camera uses a Kodak image sensor, the KODAK KAI-2020, capable of color imaging at 1600 x 1200 pixels. It has a field of view of 18 x 3.4 degrees with three filters to provide color imaging.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JunoCam