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Maryam Mirzakhani was an Iranian mathematician and a professor of mathematics at Stanford University. She was the first-ever female winner of the prestigious Fields Medal prize and the first Iranian to be honoured with the award.

Mirzakhani was born in Tehran, Iran. She attended Farzanegan School, which was part of the National Organization for Development of Exceptional Talents. In both 1994 and 1995 she won the International Mathematical Olympiads for high-school students. In the 1995 International Mathematical Olympiad, she became the first Iranian student to achieve a perfect score and to win two gold medals.

Mirzakhani continued her education at Sharif University of Technology in Tehran, where she earned a BSc in Mathematics. After this, she undertook a  a Ph.D. from Harvard University. She worked under the supervision of the Fields Medalist Curtis T. McMullen, and her dissertation focused on Simple Geodesics on Hyperbolic Surfaces and Volume of the Moduli Space of Curves. She had a unique way of working, and “would spend hours on the floor with supersized canvases of paper, sketching out ideas, drawing diagrams and formulae, often leading Anahita [her daughter] to say, “Oh, Mommy is painting again!” Mirzankhani said that “I don’t have any particular recipe [for developing new proofs] … It is like being lost in a jungle and trying to use all the knowledge that you can gather to come up with some new tricks, and with some luck you might find a way out.”

From 2004 to 2008 she was a Clay Mathematics Institute Research Fellow and an assistant professor at Princeton University. She then became a professor at Stanford University where she specialized in theoretical mathematics including moduli spaces, Teichmüller theory, hyperbolic geometry, Ergodic theory and symplectic geometry.” 

In 2014, Mirzakhani was awarded the Fields Medal prize for her work on complex geometry and dynamic systems, becoming the first-ever female winner and the first Iranian to be honoured with the award. During her lifetime, she won a number of awards including the 2009 Blumenthal Award for the Advancement of Research in Pure Mathematics and the 2013 Satter Prize of the American Mathematical Society. She worked up until her death in 2017, and was still producing amazing mathematics during her battle with cancer over the last few years.

Our Juno spacecraft will fly over Jupiter’s Great Red Spot on July 10 at 10:06 p.m. EDT. This will be humanity’s first up-close and personal view of the gas giant’s iconic 10,000-mile-wide storm, which has been monitored since 1830 and possibly existing for more than 350 years.

The data collection of the Great Red Spot is part of Juno’s sixth science flyby over Jupiter’s mysterious cloud tops. Perijove (the point at which an orbit comes closest to Jupiter’s center) will be July 10 at 9:55 p.m. EDT. 

At the time of perijove, Juno will be about 2,200 miles above the planet’s cloud tops. Eleven minutes and 33 seconds later…Juno will have covered another 24,713 miles and will be directly above the coiling crimson cloud tops of the Great Red Spot. The spacecraft will pass about 5,600 miles above its clouds. 

When will we see images from this flyby?

During the flyby, all eight of the spacecraft’s instruments will be turned on, as well as its imager, JunoCam. Because the spacecraft will be collecting data with its Microwave Radiometer (MWR), which measures radio waves from Jupiter’s deep atmosphere, we cannot downlink information during the pass. The MWR can tell us how much water there is and how material is moving far below the cloud tops.

During the pass, all data will be stored on-board…with a downlink planned afterwards. Once the downlink begins, engineering data from the spacecraft’s instruments will come to Earth first, followed by images from JunoCam.

The unprocessed, raw images will be located HERE, on approximately July 14. Follow @NASAJuno on Twitter for updates.

Did you know you can download and process these raw images?

We invite the public to act as a virtual imaging team…participating in key steps of the process, from identifying features of interest to sharing the finished images online. After JunoCam data arrives on Earth, members of the public can process the images to create color pictures. The public also helps determine which points on the planet will be photographed. Learn more about voting on JunoCam’s next target HERE.

JunoCam has four filters: red, green, blue and near-infrared. We get red, green and blue strips on one spacecraft rotation (the spacecraft rotation rate is 2 revolutions per minute) and the near-infrared strips on the second rotation. To get the final image product, the strips must be stitched together and the colors lined up.

Anything from cropping to color enhancing to collaging is fair game. Be creative!

Submit your images to [email protected] to be featured on the Mission Juno website!

Check out some of these citizen-scientist processed images from previous Juno orbits: 

Credit: Sean Doran (More)

Credit: Amelia Carolina (More)

Credit: Michael Ranger (More)

Credit: Jason Major (More)