The NASA Juno spacecraft has obtained the first images of Ganimedes, the biggest moon in Jupiter, since it flew by the frozen moon on Monday. Juno is the only spaceship that flies by Ganimedes in two decades. NASA has shared two images in its Instagram mango, which gives us a closer and detailed view of the surface of the only moon in our solar system that is larger than the planet mercury. The images: a captured from Júbiter Junocam image and the other of his stellar reference reference chamber, reveal the finest details, including craters and dark and bright terrain clearly different from Ganimedes.
The Space Agency said Juno’s Flyby was the nearest spacecraft that had reached the Giant Moon of Jupiter in 20 years. “At the time of its closest approach, Juno was 645 miles (1,038 kilometers) from the Ganymede surface,” Nasa said in Instagram.
In May 2000, the NASA Galilean spacecraft had passed as low as 162 miles (261 kilometers) on the surfaces of Lunas Galilia, producing detailed images.
The main researcher of Juno Scott Bolton of the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio said that this was the nearest spacecraft that had arrived at this Mammoth Moon in a generation, adding that they will take time before drawing scientific conclusions. “Until then, we can simply marvel with this heavenly wonder,” he was cited by saying in a blog publication of NASA.
The image of light-light visible from the spacecraft, using its green filter, captured almost a whole side of the moon with ice-ice inlaid. NASA said on its website that later, when the versions of the same image disinflate incorporating the red and blue filters from the camera, images experts can provide a color portrait of ganimede. The spacecraft will be sending more images in the coming days.
The navigation chamber of the Juno stellar reference unit obtained the image on the dark side of the giant moon on June 7 during its flyby.
Heidi Becker, the lead of monitoring of Juno’s radiation in JPL said that the conditions in which this image was collected were ideal for a low light chamber like the one they used. “Then, this is a different part of the surface that seen by junocam to direct sunlight. It will be fun to see what the two teams can come together,” said Becker.
It is expected that the meeting of Juno with the Joviana Moon gives the ideas about its composition, the ionosphere, the magnetosphere and the ice shell. It is also expected to provide measurements of the radiation environment that benefits future missions to the Jovian system.
According to the information about the general information page of Juno de la NASA, Juno’s main objective is to understand the origin and evolution of Jupiter.
The space agency says that under its dense coverage of the cloud, Jupiter protects secrets to the fundamental processes and conditions that ruled the solar system during his training. The planet can also provide critical knowledge to understand the planetary systems that are discovered around other stars.