Here’s the First Image From Juno’s Flyby of Jupiter’s Moon Europa
NASA’s Juno mission, a part of the New Frontiers Program managed at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, has just revealed a stunning close-up picture of Jupiter’s moon, Europa.
This image, represents the closest look any spacecraft has provided of the moon since Jan. 3, 2000, when NASA’s Galileo came within 218 miles (351 kilometers) of the surface.
Europa is the sixth-largest moon in the solar system, and is slightly smaller than Earth’s own moon. Researchers believe that below its miles-thick ice shell, a salty ocean could be awaiting discovery. Throughout the years, numerous hypotheses have been formulated -and publicly debated- regarding the potential life-supporting conditions of the moon.
According to the NASA website “This segment of the first image of Europa taken during this flyby by the spacecraft’s JunoCam (a public-engagement camera) zooms in on a swath of Europa’s surface north of the equator. It reveals surface features in a region near the moon’s equator called Annwn Regio.”
What’s next for Juno? The mission explored Ganymede in June 2021 and is scheduled to make close flybys of Io, the most volcanic body in the solar system, in 2023 and 2024.
Follow the Juno mission with NASA’s interactive webapp: Eyes on the Solar System.
More information about Juno is available at: https://www.nasa.gov/juno
