Galileo expert N.M. Swerdlow says that Galileo is not just the biggest planet but it's also the busiest! Because it's interior functions like a gigantic heat engine tat emits a tremendous amount of energy across the radius of the planet and producing massive turbulence on a gigantic scale. He calls it a sublimely awful place. The super fast rotation also doesn't help. This is from the scholar's book review of astronomer Thomas Hockeys book Galileo's Planet, which examines the history of our human observations of Jupiter. The book is pretty wonderful and the video below even better.
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Since NASA's Juno probe entered Jupiter's orbit a year ago, it's been sending back high-resolution images of the solar system's biggest planet.
When NASA released the latest batch of images, last month, German mathematician Gerald Eichstaedt got to work, turning them into into a video. Using software that he wrote, Eichstaedt used Juno's trajectory data to determine the probe's exact position when it captured an image, and then placed that image on a spherical model of the planet. The resulting video combines 36 images from the probe to simulate a Jovian flyby.
London-based filmmaker Seán Doran saw the video when Eichstaedt uploaded it to unmannedspaceflight.com and spent another 12 hours smoothing the thousands of frames, before adding a soundtrack.
It's almost like being there. Almost...
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