NASA's recent flyby photo of Jupiter looks more like art than planet's atmosphere

NASA's recent photo of Jupiter taken during a recent flyby makes the planet's turbulent atmosphere look more like "The Starry Night" than one would expect.

The image at the top of this article was taken by the U.S. space agency's Juno Spacecraft at 9:43 a.m. Dec. 16, 2017. NASA says the spacecraft was about one Earth diameter away from Jupiter when it took the "mind-bending" shot of the planet's atmosphere.

High Above the Jovian Clouds: This image of colorful, turbulent clouds in #Jupiter's northern hemisphere was captured during my latest flyby of the planet https://t.co/zQ6OFl5WLC pic.twitter.com/NWMxnJzGwA
-- NASA's Juno Mission (@NASAJuno) January 4, 2018

"Each new orbit brings us closer to the heart of Jupiter's radiation belt, but so far the spacecraft has weathered the storm of electrons surrounding Jupiter better than we could have ever imagined," Rick Nybakken, project manager for Juno, said in a past news release.

The U.S. space agency's Juno spacecraft was launched to unlock Jupiter's secrets to improve the understanding of not only the solar system's origins, but the gigantic planet's as well.

NASA reports Juno's mission is to try and determine how much water is in the planet's atmosphere and to measure its composition, temperature and cloud patterns. It will also attempt to map Jupiter's magnetic and gravity fields.

It launched on Aug. 5, 2011 and arrived to Jupiter in July of 2016. Juno will orbit the planet for 20 months, and de-orbit into the planet in February 2018.

"Juno's principal goal is to understand the origin and evolution of Jupiter. Underneath its dense cloud cover, Jupiter safeguards secrets to the fundamental processes and conditions that governed our solar system during its formation," NASA explains. "As our primary example of a giant planet, Jupiter can also provide critical knowledge for understanding the planetary systems being discovered around other stars.

New #JunoCam raw images from my latest #Jupiter flyby are available now. Download, process + share https://t.co/ijHwy72xXp #citizenscience pic.twitter.com/6uojzeWx9Q
-- NASA's Juno Mission (@NASAJuno) December 20, 2017

"Juno will let us take a giant step forward in our understanding of how giant planets form and the role these titans played in putting together the rest of the solar system."

NASA reports findings from Juno's first year in orbit, as of July 2017, details the solar system's largest planet as a turbulent and energetic one, with a "complex interior structure."

The mission is part of the space agency's New Frontiers program, which is managed out of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.

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