Juno's Perijove-35 Ganymede and Jupiter Flyby, Reconstructed in 150-Fold Time-Lapse, White-Balanced

2021-09-14 11:46 UT
Credit : NASA / JPL / SwRI / MSSS / SPICE / Gerald Eichstädt © cc by
Submitted By : Maquet-80
Mission Phase : PERIJOVE 35

On July 20, 2021, NASA's Juno probe flew by Ganymede, before she successfully performed her Perijove-35 Jupiter flyby about 15 hours later on July 21, 2021.

The movie consists of two sequences, a Ganymede flyby sequence, and a Jupiter flyby sequence.

The Ganymede sequence covers about 40 real time minutes.

Jupiter flyby portion of the movie is a reconstruction of the 4 hours between 2021-07-21T06:30:00.000 and 2021-07-21T10:30:00.000 in 150-fold time-lapse.

The movie is based on 52 of the JunoCam images taken, and on spacecraft trajectory data provided via SPICE kernel files.

Two of the PJ35 Ganymede images and 50 of the PJ35 Jupiter images have been used.

In steps of five real-time seconds, one still images of the movie has been rendered from at least one suitable raw image. This resulted in short scenes, usually of a few seconds.

Playing with 30 images per second results in 150-fold time-lapse.

Resulting overlapping scenes have been blended and white-balanced using a home-made software tool.

The final still images were converted to MP4 using ffmpeg.

In natural colors, Jupiter looks pretty pale. Therefore, the still images were approximately illumination-adusted before further post-processing, i.e. almost flattened, and consecutively gamma-stretched to the 4th power of radiometric values, in order to enhance contrast and color.

Like for all its previous flybys, Juno approached Jupiter roughly from north, and left Jupiter looking towards the soutern hemisphere.

JunoCam was built and is operated by Malin Space Science Systems in San Diego / California / USA.

Many people at NASA, JPL, SwRI, and elsewhere have been, are, and will be required to plan and operate the Juno mission.