NASA's Juno Snapping Dramatic Artwork of Jupiter's String Of Pearls!

NASA's Juno spacecraft orbiting Jupiter seeks to reveal secrets of the giant planet in the Solar System. The spacecraft reached perijove at the closest point in its 53.5-day orbiting cycle around Jupiter. The spacecraft was busy snapping images of Jupiter at its finest.

In Science, perijove is the point in the orbit of a satellite of Jupiter nearest the planet's center. Juno made its third close on Sunday, December 11. Juno arrived at the planet on July 4 and entered the 53-day orbit. The next close flyby for Juno will be on February 2, 2017. Currently, the spacecraft is 15,300 miles away from Jupiter.

The spacecraft flicked a photo of the seventh of eight features forming a string of pearls on Jupiter. These are the massive counterclockwise rotating colossal storms that appear as white ovals in the gas giant's southern hemisphere as a weird dark spot. After the perijove flyby, raw images captured by JunoCam's green, red, blue and methane filters are uploaded online.

This dramatic close-up snap was posted via JunoCam. JunoCam is an instrument designed to share public download images and enhances the photos freely. It has a visible light color camera that was designed to flick the planet's cloud tops and poles. This photo will allow scientists to build 3D maps to know more about Jupiter's radio emissions, radiation belts, gravity field and ionosphere.

Juno took this spectacular photo at 9:27 a.m. PST while having a range of about 15,300 miles (24,600 kilometers). The spacecraft carries four-star tracker cameras which were designed for navigation and programmed to identify non-stellar objects. Dozens of objects were found. Scientists speculated that the objects were either a small satellite orbiting the planet's rings or bright flashes from the particle raged off of Juno's solar panels due to micrometeorite impacts.