Juno probe transmits new photos of Europa, moon of Jupiter

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Europa, Jupiter’s ice-encrusted moon, is still all they said. NASA’s Juno spacecraft has been orbiting Jupiter since 2016 and on Thursday morning (29) passed 352 km from Europa’s surface, traveling at more than 48,000 km/h.

The four images taken during the flyby — the closest observations of the moon recorded since January 2000 — arrived at Earth in less than 12 hours.

“They’re stunning,” commented scientist Candice J. Hansen-Koharcheck of the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Arizona, who is responsible for operating the probe’s main camera, JunoCam.

In its press release, NASA highlighted an image that focuses on a region near the moon’s equator, Annwn Regio, showing long fractures running through the bright, icy surface.

The extraterrestrial landscape matches what has been seen by previous NASA visitors: the two Voyager probes that passed through the Jupiter system in 1979 and the Galileo probe, which orbited Jupiter from 1995 to 2003.

The fractures pointed to the possibility of an ocean on Europa hidden beneath the ice; it would create the fractures due to the rise and fall of the tides. Other data — especially magnetic field measurements that indicated an electrically conductive layer, like a salt ocean — convinced planetary scientists that an ocean does indeed exist on Europa.

The presence of liquid water makes Europa a promising place to look for life elsewhere in the solar system.

Juno’s flyby does not change history.

“I wouldn’t say there was any element that made us react like, ‘Oh my God, this is new!'” said Hansen-Koharcheck. What the new images do is give us a better look at certain parts of the Jovian moon and help fill in the details.

“We will be able to have a better understanding of the geological history, because we can link different ridges and faults and get a more global or regional picture”, said the scientist.

“I can’t say ‘this thing alone here is just amazing,'” she pointed out. Instead, there are several things that pique her interest. “It’s those kinds of data. There’s so much complexity in Europe itself, and these images reveal that very well.”

The four images are available on the Juno website. The original photos have a brownish orange hue, but the moon should look lighter in reality. This is because the camera was included in the space probe to attract audience participation; it was not initially thought of as a scientific instrument. “We didn’t make the effort to white balance,” said Hansen-Koharcheck. “It’s not intentional at all.”

People all over the world immediately started downloading the images and enhancing them.

The photos, along with other data gathered by Juno, will help scientists who are planning the Europa Clipper, a NASA mission scheduled to launch in 2024 and which will make repeated close flybys of Europa. It will also assist the Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer, or JUICE, a European Space Agency mission scheduled to launch in 2023 that will study Europa and two other moons of Jupiter, Callisto and Ganymede.

Juno was launched in 2011 and arrived at Jupiter, the largest planet in the solar system, in 2016. She made several dives close to Jupiter so her instruments could see below the planet’s clouds. The dives revealed never-before-seen lightning at high atmospheric altitudes and showers of ammonia-rich clumps the size of baseballs, which scientists dubbed “mushballs.”

When the main mission tasks were completed last year, NASA approved an extension of Juno’s mission: 42 additional orbits of Jupiter that included close flybys of three of the large moons: Ganymede, Europa and Io.

Juno completed its flyby of Ganymede in June 2021. It will see Io, the most volcanically active site in the solar system, more closely in 2023 and 2024.

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