NASA’s Juno spacecraft takes closest images of Europa for 20 years

NASA’s Juno spacecraft flew simply 352 kilometres above Jupiter’s moon Europa, sending again terribly detailed pictures of the floor

By Leah Crane

NASA’s Juno spacecraft has taken the closest pictures of Jupiter’s moon Europa in additional than twenty years. On 29 September, it flew simply 352 kilometres above the floor of the icy moon, solely the third time any spacecraft has been inside 500 kilometres of it. The pictures from this daring swoop are terribly detailed.

On the time of the flyby, Juno was travelling at almost 24 kilometres per second, so it solely had a two-hour window to gather detailed knowledge earlier than it sailed away once more. In that point, it took footage and picked up knowledge on the moon’s floor composition, inside construction and its interplay with the magnetic discipline of Jupiter. The photographs reveal ridges and channels slicing throughout Europa’s floor, in addition to small impression craters.

“The science staff will probably be evaluating the total set of pictures obtained by Juno with pictures from earlier missions, seeking to see if Europa’s floor options have modified over the previous twenty years,” mentioned Sweet Hansen on the Planetary Science Institute in Arizona in a press release. “The JunoCam pictures will fill within the present geologic map, changing current low-resolution protection of the world.”

This new knowledge will assist researchers put together for the Europa Clipper mission, which is ready to launch in 2024 in an effort to find out whether or not the frigid moon may host life beneath its icy shell. Apart from its deep subsurface ocean, the Juno knowledge ought to reveal whether or not there are shallow pockets of liquid water throughout the shell.

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