NASA shares breathtaking close-up clip of Jupiter from Juno spacecraft. Watch!

You may have seen various photos of Jupiter taken from a distant telescope from Earth. But have you ever seen the mighty planet up close? NASA has released new footage of Jupiter that was taken by the Juno spacecraft that has been hovering over the gas giant since 2016. The US agency has shared an incredible animated sequence created by citizen scientist Andrea Luck using raw JunoCam image data. This clip shows a close shot of the giant planet when the spacecraft flew just 2,050 miles (3,300 kilometres) above thegas giant's cloud tops on April 9.

This was Juno's 41st flyby above the radiation-spewing planet, during which the spacecraft soared at a top speed of 131,000 mph (210,000 km/h) relative to Jupiter, NASA said on May 27.

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That's more than seven times faster than the speed of theInternational Space Stationorbits Earth and about five times faster than the crewedApollo missionswere travelling as they leftEarthforthe moon, NASA officials said in the statement.

Though Juno was initially targeted to cover only Jupiter, NASA in January 2021 announced that it is extending the mission's mandate to focus a little more closely on the planet's four large moons, especially Ganymede, Europaand Io. Juno spacecraft is expected to run until September 2025.

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"With the extended mission, we will answer fundamental questions that arose during Juno's prime mission while reaching beyond the planet to explore Jupiter’s ring system and Galilean satellites," principal investigator Scott Bolton, of the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, said in a NASAstatement when the extension was announced.

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