JunoCam: Explore Jupiter From Home
On yet another cloudy night here in Arvada, we’ll highlight a very unique NASA mission.
Juno is a space probe launched by NASA in 2011 to visit Jupiter and study it up close, but it included a very special project to engage a much wider audience.
For the first time, a major space agency launched an interplanetary spacecraft with an instrument not specifically designed for scientific research. This instrument is the JunoCam, a camera that was designed not for researchers but the general public. Traditionally the data collected from planetary missions is embargoed for a period of time to allow the researchers who are operating the mission to review and study the data and make claims to any new discoveries. The downside is that these incredible new findings aren’t available to the public for quite a while.
JunoCam bypasses the scientific review process and instead makes its data available to the general public immediately, but with a twist. Instead of the glamorous and highly processed images we’re accustomed to seeing from NASA, the images are in their raw form and need to be processed. This is where citizen scientists can make meaningful contributions to an actual NASA mission by downloading these raw images and processing them with nothing more than a home computer.
NASA maintains a gallery of user-submitted images which are frequently used in scientific publications and publicity materials (with proper attribution).
Want to give it a try? All you need is the link to the raw data and any image editor such as Photoshop or the open-source (free) editor “GIMP”.
JunoCam download page:
Download GIMP Photo Editor:
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