Nasa's JunoCam Captures Closest Ever Breathtaking Pictures Of Jupiter's Great Red Spot

Nasa's Juno Mission becomes the first to capture awe-inspiring images of Jupiter's great red spot with its first ever up-close flyby of the enormous storm.

This was the closest any spacecraft has ever flown to the gigantic storm which is a 16,000km-wide, only to be 3,500 km above the planet and approximately 9,000 km above the clouds of the storm itself.

A look at Jupiter, the solar system's largest planet, a gargantuan ball of gas -- mostly hydrogen and helium -- 11 times the diameter of Earth with more than twice as much mass as all the other planets combined.

1. The Great Red Spot on Jupiter is shown in this NASA Juno spacecraft photo released on July 12, 2017.

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2. NASA's Juno spacecraft in orbit above Jupiter's Great Red Spot is seen in this undated handout illustration.

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3. NASA's enhanced-color image of a mysterious dark spot on Jupiter shows a Jovian "galaxy" of swirling storms in this image captured by NASA's Juno spacecraft.

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4. Jupiter's south pole is seen in an image from NASA's Juno spacecraft taken.

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5. Jupiter's Great Red Spot is pictured in this handout photograph taken by NASA's Voyager.

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The Great Red Spot is a massive anticyclone -- a storm three and a half times the size of Earth -- located in Jupiter's southern hemisphere. This image was assembled from three black and white negatives.

6. Auroras created by high-energy particles are seen on a pole of the planet Jupiter in a NASA composite of two separate images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope.

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7. Jupiter's north pole is seen in an image from NASA's Juno spacecraft taken.

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8. NASA's Juno spacecraft obtained this colour view at a distance of 6.8 million miles from Jupiter.

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The scene was captured by the mission's imaging camera, called JunoCam, which is designed to acquire high resolution views of features in Jupiter's atmosphere from very close to the planet.

9. The planet Jupiter is shown with one of its moons, Ganymede (bottom), in this NASA handout taken.

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10. Three of Jupiter's largest moons are seen moving across the banded face of Jupiter in these images from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope taken.

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Jupiter's four largest moons can commonly be seen transiting the face of the giant planet and casting shadows onto its cloud tops. However, seeing three moons transiting the face of Jupiter at the same time is rare, occurring only once or twice a decade, according to a NASA news release.

11. Particle debris in Jupiter's atmosphere is seen after an object hurtled into the atmosphere, in these infrared images obtained from NASA's Infrared Telescope Facility in Mauna Kea, Hawaii, and released by NASA.

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The image on the left was taken July 20, 2009 and the image on the right was taken August 16, 2009. The impact and its after-effects can be seen as the bright spot on the lower left of the July 20 image and as the bright smudge on the lower left of the August 16 image. By August 16, the debris had been sheared apart to a larger extent by Jupiter's winds. A hurtling asteroid about the size of the Titanic caused the scar that appeared in Jupiter's atmosphere on July 19, 2009, according to two papers published recently in the journal Icarus.

12. NASA's Hubble Space Telescope took this photo, of Jupiter with Hubble's Wide Field Planetary Camera 2

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Using the planetary camera detector. Jupiter's trademark belts and zones of high- and low-pressure regions appear in crisp detail. Circular convection cells can be seen at high northern and southern latitudes.