NASA recently released a photo of Jupiter’s giant moon Ganymede captured by the organization’s Juno spacecraft. This photo shows the surface of Ganymede and shows craters and long structural features that NASA says could be linked to tectonic faults on the moon. Along with the second photo of Ganymede published by NASA, this image also shows the dark and light terrain of the moon in stunning detail.
Juno’s flight over Ganymede is actually the closest a spacecraft has flown to Jupiter’s largest moon in more than two decades. One photo was taken with Juno’s JunoCam imager, while the other was taken with the Stellar Reference Unit’s star camera.
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NASA explained (via DP Review) that the JunoCam image was taken “with a green filter…”, with the visible light imager capturing “almost the entire water-ice-covered page of the moon”. While the photo we see above is currently in black and white, “later, when a version of the same image is released with the camera’s red and blue filters, image experts can provide a color portrait of Ganymede.”
Scott Bolton, Juno Principal Investigator at the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, said, “This is the next closest spacecraft to this giant moon in a generation. We’ll take our time before drawing any concrete conclusions, but until then.” we can only marvel at this heavenly wonder.”
When Juno took the two photos shown here, he was within 1,038 km (645 miles) of Ganymede’s surface. JunoCam captures a very wide image of the moon with the “image strip” shown above [that] recorded separately by red, green and blue filters”.
Meanwhile, the Stellar Reference Unit (the navigation camera that keeps Juno on track) has taken a second black-and-white photo (below) of the dark side of Ganymede, dimly lit by light reflecting off Jupiter’s surface.
The photos taken by Juno were used to gain insight into the composition of the moon, ionosphere, magnetosphere and ice shells. That NASA website says, “The Juno science team will search the images, compare them with those from previous missions, and look for changes in surface features that could occur over four decades. Any changes in the distribution of craters on the surface could help astronomers better understand their flow. . “The population of objects that hit the moon outside the solar system.”
Among NASA’s Mars Perseverance Rover and the last Ring of Fire Solar Eclipse, there is a lot of astrophotography excitement happening this year.
