NASA's $1 billion Jupiter probe has taken mind-bending new photos of the gas giant

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NASA's $1 billion Jupiter probe has taken mind-bending new photos of the gas giant

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NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/Kevin Gill

An illustration of NASA's Juno spacecraft flying above the clouds of Jupiter.

NASA's $1 billion Juno spacecraft completed its 10th high-speed trip around Jupiter on December 16.

The robot gets relatively close to the gas giant planet and takes new photos with its JunoCam instrument roughly every 53 days, while traveling at speeds up to 130,000 mph.

It can take days or sometimes weeks to receive the images, but the wait is worth it. The latest batch of photos features countless swirling, hallucinatory clouds and storms.

Researchers at NASA and the Southwest Research Institute uploaded the raw image data to their websites in late December. Since then, dozens of people have processed the black-and-white files into gorgeous, calendar-ready pictures.

"As pretty as a planet can get, but get too close and Jupiter will END YOU," Sean Doran, a UK-based graphic artist who regularly processes NASA images, said about the new images in a tweet.

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Here are some of the best new photos and animations made with JunoCam data by Doran and other fans of the spacecraft.