At a Glance

The Juno spacecraft will make the closest pass in history to Jupiter's Great Red Spot on Monday evening.It will approach the massive storm at 5,600 miles above the cloud tops, NASA said.

In a few days, NASA will get its best look ever at the largest storm in the solar system: Jupiter's Great Red Spot.

The Juno spacecraft will make a close pass to the solar system's largest planet on Monday evening, coming as close as , according to NASA. Less than 12 minutes later, Juno will pass over the Red Spot at a distance of 5,600 miles, the report added.

It's the closest any spacecraft has ever come to the 10,000-mile-wide storm.

"When you get close to Jupiter, ," Scott Bolton, Juno's principal investigator, told Gizmodo. "You see all these features and it looks like a piece of art. So I have some expectation that the Red Spot's gonna be like that, but I don't know what it will look like. I don't know if it'll look kind of simple, or have this incredible complexity even up close, [like] these swirls of different colors moving around."

(MORE: )

Astronomers have monitored the massive Red Spot since 1830, and the NASA release said it's possible the storm has been raging for more than 350 years. The Red Spot is capable of producing wind gusts as high as 400 mph – twice as strong as a high-end EF4 tornado.

"It sees through the cloud tops, and we can investigate ,"Bolton told Popular Science. "Do we see a signature at all underneath the cloud tops, or is it just a shallow feature? That helps us understand maybe how it's made, and why it's lasted this long."

Juno recently celebrated a milestone, as Tuesday marked one year since the spacecraft first entered Jupiter's orbit, according to NASA. It traveled some 71 million miles around the planet during that time, the report added.

The spacecraft's mission began Aug. 5, 2011, when it launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida.

MORE ON WEATHER.COM: 10 Things to Know About the Juno Mission

Juno's mission is to get a glimpse of the of Jupiter's surface through the planet's cloud-socked atmosphere and map the interior from a unique vantage point above the poles. Some questions NASA hopes to answer: How much water exists? Is there a solid core? Why are Jupiter's southern and northern lights the brightest in the solar system?