NASA's $1 billion Jupiter probe just sent back breathtaking new images of the gas giant

NASA/JPL-Caltech

An illustration of NASA's Juno probe at Jupiter.

A probe the size of a basketball court has taken unprecedented new images of Jupiter.

NASA's $1 billion Juno spacecraft, launched in August 2011, took five years to reach and settle into orbit around the gas giant, which is located more than 415 million miles from Earth.

The probe has so far photographed Jupiter's poles for the first time, detected bizarre cloud formations, recorded mysterious auroras, and scanned deep into the planet's thick cloud tops.

Juno repeatedly swings by Jupiter in a wide arc to minimize time inside the planet's intense radiation belts, which can damage sensitive electronics.

NASA planned to fire Juno's thrusters in October 2016 to increase the frequency of these flybys (from once every 53.5 days to every two weeks), but sticky engine valves botched that operation.

Now flybys happen about once every 2 months.

Juno completed the fifth such maneuver on March 27, recording a fresh batch of images and streaming that raw data back to Earth. Bow amateur astronomers are beginning to turn the gray, unprocessed photos into brilliant full-color images.

Here are a handful of our favorite shots from the fifth orbit, plus a few other images that space fans have recently uploaded to Juno's website from previous flybys.