Are we going to get amazing Pluto-like images, like that chilling closeup? They really impressed me A LOT. Or is Jupiter close enough for us to already know enough about its surface?
Juno will be passing within 3,000 miles of the tops of Jupiter's clouds. Since Jupiter's radius is 43,000 miles, it will fill the entire frame. The only question is how high-quality the camera is.
The camera is for public relations only (no science) and I don't know the resolution. But this photo was taken from 2.7M miles, so you can expect the resolution to get roughly 9 thousand times better.
EDIT:
> Jupiter itself will only appear to be 75 pixels across from JunoCam when Juno reaches the furthest point of its orbit around the planet. At its closest approaches JunoCam could achieve 15 km/pixel resolution from 4300 km, while Hubble has taken images of up to 119 km/pixel from 600 million km....The camera uses a Kodak image sensor, the KODAK KAI-2020, capable of color imaging at 1600 x 1200 pixels. It has a field of view of 18 x 3.4 degrees with three filters to provide color imaging.
In comparison, the highest resolution photos of Pluto from New Horizons achieved 80 meters per pixel from a closest approach of 12500 km. Its amazing how good the camera was on New Horizons.
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/new-horizons-best-close-up-of-p...
It's not similar to a cell phone camera at all. Cell phone cameras are usually much higher resolution (current iPhone is 8 megapixels vs the 2 for Juno), but with a much smaller sensor (iPhone cam has a 1.5µm pixel size vs 7.4µm for Juno).
[1] On average.
td;dr Juno has a fine sensor and lens
You can go buy a camera with the same sensor if you'd like, but they're expensive:
http://www.qsimaging.com/620-overview.html
I believe it's the same sensor that flew on the Curiosity mission and we all know those photos are fantastic. They are also flight tested, invaluable for missions like this where you only get one shot at it.
You also seem to feel the need to defend Juno, as if I was attacking it somehow, so I don't think this conversation can be very productive.
But, as you have made clear, you were just making a statement about the combination of wide field-of-view (i.e., the optics) and the number of pixels, which both figure in to resolution. (By contrast with the New Horizons LORRI instrument, which had a very narrow FOV, because they did not approach Pluto closely.)
If one takes a breath and re-reads what you wrote, this meaning is evident. On the other hand, it's very easy to mis-interpret what you wrote.
Because sensor size is what's important in digital photography, you can always stitch together multiple images to get more resolution. A large sensor like what's flying on Juno is orders of magnitude better than a camera phone sensor regardless of the resolution. In general cell phone cameras (which you decided to compare Juno's to) are high resolution, but with small a sensor (everything in a phone is small!). Juno is the opposite, low resolution and a large sensor. If you want to take pictures of stuff in space you most certainly want a large sensor.
> You also seem to feel the need to defend Juno, as if I was attacking it somehow, so I don't think this conversation can be very productive.
Well you did attack it by saying its camera was the same quality as a camera phone (aka cheap and shitty). It's not similar to a camera phone whatsoever, you were just plain wrong.
This statement made my day. I guess if a phone must have a camera on it then a spacecraft has to have one too.
There is a "gravity sensor" which is really, I think, an extremely careful Doppler measurement which will allow us to infer the mass distribution within Jupiter.
No. The camera on Juno was literally an after thought. Originally it wasn't even going to have one. It's main job is studying magnetic fields and radiation belts.
In addition to fields and radiation instruments you mention, there are two other imaging spectrographs, one an IR instrument and one in UV. The IR camera can look ~70 km down below the cloud tops.
Importantly, there is a microwave radiometer, which can peer ~500km beneath the clouds to determine atmospheric composition as a function of time and space.
They have put Juno in a polar orbit, so it will scan the atmosphere through dozens of orbits before the radiation kills the instruments.
Doubt we'll see depth, unless it's through fortuitous breaks in high clouds. Other (non-imaging) instruments (microwave sounders, etc.) will tell us what's going on in Jupiter's interior. Metallic hydrogen? Rocky core? Juno may tell us.