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by valarauca1 3630 days ago
>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.

1 comments

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.