The solar-powered Juno reached the low point of its 53-day orbit around Jupiter, at 9:55 p.m. EDT (GMT-4) Monday, passing within about 2,200 miles of the planet's cloud tops. Eleven-and-a-half minutes later, it made its first pass directly over the Great Red Spot at an altitude of about 5,600 miles and a velocity of some 130,000 mph. #Juno pic.twitter.com/G0JXHL6Rav — Tom Kerss (@tomkerss) July 13, 2017 
 
 
 
 (NASA / SwRI / MSSS) 
 
 
 
 (NASA / SwRI / MSSS) 
 
 #Jupiter's NNTZ Little Red Spot processed from #JunoCam raw data. NASA 
 
 The spacecraft's camera -- JunoCam -- and its eight other science instruments were all operating at close approach and the first raw, unprocessed pictures were posted on the camera website early Wednesday. My first processed raw map-projected image of #Jupiter's Great Red Spot from @NASAJuno's P7 flyover on July 10-11 #GRSflyover pic.twitter.com/DpSYHA7IVt — Jason Major (@JPMajor) July 12, 2017 
 
 
 
 (Tom Momary via NASA) 
 
 New @NASAJuno community images are amazing! "Now, Juno and her cloud-penetrating science instruments will dive in to see how deep the roots of this storm go, and help us understand how this giant storm works and what makes it so special," Scott Bolton, Juno’s principal investigator, said in a statement. We'll definitely get an up-close-and-personal view, and hopefully be able to provide something that lets the viewer feel like they're riding along." Six years later, on July 4, 2016, Juno's main engine fired to put the craft into an initial 53-day polar orbit. We'll look several hundred kilometers down in this first pass."
– Jupiter's Great Red Spot has never looked greater. On Monday, NASA's Juno spacecraft got closer to the giant storm than any man-made object in history, the Washington Post reports. According to CBS News, Juno came within 2,200 miles of Jupiter's clouds and 5,600 miles of the Great Red Spot itself. On Wednesday, NASA started releasing the closest photos of the storm ever taken. The images are composites of photos taken using red, green, blue, and infrared filters, Vox explains. Some of them have an hour-glass shape due to Juno's spinning. In addition to photos, Juno sent back data on Jupiter's magnetic fields, the mass and composition of its atmosphere, and more. This data will likely be studied for years. The Great Spot is the biggest storm in the solar system. Its 400mph winds have been going for nearly 200 years and likely longer than that. At 10,000 miles wide, it would cover the Earth. "Here's the largest and most fierce storm in the entire solar system and it's lasted hundreds of years," NASA's Scott Bolton tells CBS. "The question is, how can it last that long? What's powering it, how's it really working inside?" In addition to those questions, scientists hope to use the data from Juno to find out how deep the Great Red Spot goes, why it's red, and why it's been shrinking in recent decades. The answers to these questions could help us understand more about how the solar system formed and how weather works both at home and throughout the galaxy.