NASA’s Juno spacecraft has taken its first images of the largest moon orbiting Jupiter.
Ganymede, discovered by Galileo Galilei in 1610, is one of the 79 identified moons that orbits the great planet and is the ninth largest object in the solar system and is even larger than the planet Mercury.
Starting today, we can all take a closer look when Juno captured Ganymede’s North Pole now that there is technology to see it in more detail.
Now, for the first time, the Jovian, a term that refers to the Jupiter family, which includes Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, the infrared auroral mapping (JIRAM) instrument from NASA’s Juno spacecraft, took the first images of the northern border of Ganymede.
The above images, captured during a Jupiter flyby on December 26, 2019, gave us the first infrared mapping of the gigantic moon’s north pole.
The images show that there is an unusual form of ice on the pole, a type that we don’t see here on Earth, because the magnetic field filters particles from the sun, basically plasma, towards it.
Without a decent atmosphere, it’s essentially raining plasma onto Ganymede’s ice.
According to NASA, on Earth, the magnetic field provides a pathway for charged particles from the Sun, or plasma, to enter our atmosphere and create auroras, such as the northern and southern lights, seen in the polar regions.
This is not the last we will hear from that side of the solar system.
Juno’s discovery is, for now, the only one to be explored there, but it could change very soon, as the European Space Agency’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer mission is slated to begin a three-and-a-half-year exploration of the turbulent atmosphere. Jupiter in 2030.
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