I hope we do get some HD photos and even videos of the big red spot - the mega storm withe size of the Earth circling on the "surface" of Jupiter.

..and the new star has formed. ;)

Remember the polar orbit; images will largely be of the pole the closest approach will be on. And the JunoCam was added as a public outreach instrument, not actually part of the mission's main science payload, and is only designed to operate for the first 7-8 orbits, with unknown effects of the heavy radiation on image quality even till then. Past that, not being an actual science instrument, it's limited in how much data it gets to send back, I see only up to 40 Mb per orbit, so won't be many images. Resolution is 1600x1200 and it may provide decent detail at closest approach (but, again, pole). About moons though, I see a best of 232 km / pixel for Io, so the whole moon will be just 16 pixels wide.
The public can get involved in selecting where to take those few pictures per orbit though.

Yeah... Pioneer 10 flew by Jupiter in 1973, and in fact can be said to have been in the outer solar system since 1972 when it crossed the asteroid belt. Then it kept going on a solar system escape trajectory and Pioneer 11 came right behind it to fly by Jupiter as well in 1974, keep going and fly by Saturn in 1979. In that same 1979, the Voyagers flew by Jupiter and with the Grand Tour finishing with the Neptune flyby in 1989 there was clearly something active there for that entire decade. Then there was a bit of a break, but there was Ulysses getting a Jupiter gravity assist in 1992, before Galileo entered Jupiter orbit as the first outer solar system orbiter in 1995. And it stayed there till 2003, by which time Cassini was already close to Saturn, where it entered orbit in 2004 and has been there ever since. And now, assuming current plans will hold, after early 2018 we're looking at something like a decade of nothing out there. For comparison, it was a little over a decade between first putting a man in space and first reaching the outer solar system. And now for apparently a similar length of time we apparently just decided not to send anything there again.
Weren't we supposed to be getting better? Where did that go? (This always makes me tear up.)

Polar orbit doesn't mean it only orbit the poles, though. It means its orbit will go around the 2 poles, and everything else between them. Which seems a good idea, since they will cover far more ground than with a classic equatorial orbit.
Unless I missed something? (Like a very excentric eliptical orbit, which would seem suboptimal for a good observation)

They are very eccentric orbits. Heavy radiation, remember? Closest approach at under 5000 km, other end of it at... Hm, can't find exact data, oddly enough, just a Wikipedia reference saying it's beyond the orbit of Callisto, which is at almost 1.9 million km.

Aaah OK, it was not the kind of polar orbits I envisionned. Thanks, consider me educated :)
Looks like the periapsis on the first few orbits should be pretty close to the equator, though.

Big post with all details about what to expect from JunoCam.

And going by that data, since it says rule of thumb is divide 210 by distance to Jupiter in millions of km to get rough size of Jupiter in image in pixels and I see the apoapsis of those first 2 orbits at 26 pixels, that gives a ballpark estimate of 8 million km. And then if the image is to scale for the orbits, which I assume it is, that means the science orbits will take it not just beyond 1.9 million but even beyond 3 million km.

this romanian Cavalary - he doesn't even know basic english, it's cavalry not "cavalary". and yet he's so obsessed with space exploration! o.O he crazy! it can't be denied

Thanks for the source, man. The diagrams give me the impression there are a few "close" flybys of the equator, esp during the perijove (cool, a new word!) of the first few orbits, but I'll read it more in detail once I'm home :)

Oh, and let's just ignore the crazy person who just stumbled in the room, shall we? ^^

why do you care so much about stupid space? even if there would be aliens let's say on jupiter, we're never going to meet them during our lives. so talking about such things is pure pointless it's like talking about gnomes, elves, etc. why not play a sci-fi or fantasy game rather than talk about it? it's much more entertaining and you don't have to believe in those things in order to have fun

Check the following link; plenty new words for you! :)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apsis


Oh, look, the same could be said for you - it's "stupid", not "ciomalau".
If you think we explore our neighbourhood because of aliens, you miss the point. ;)

aaaah... stupid pigeon shit on my screen agen! :( why so stupid eh? you study at stupids' academy? maybe you should become teacher

Ooooooh, shiny! :)

here you go tinyP
the first picture of jupiter by juno on nasa's official twatter err twitter [url=https://twitter.com/NASA/status/752993447074750466/photo/1?ref_src=twsrc^tfw]https://twitter.com/NASA/status/752993447074750466/photo/1?ref_src=twsrc^tfw[/url]

as you can tell its not all that much yet