GanymedeGet ready to get close.
No probe has had a good view of Jupiter’s largest moon since 2000, when NASA Galileo’s spaceship Swinging through an alien world, it is the largest moon in the entire solar system. However on Monday (June 7), 13:35 EDT (1735 GMT), NASA Juno The spacecraft will travel 645 miles (1,038 kilometers) above Ganymede’s surface, accumulating numerous observations as it does so.
“Juno brings a sensitive set of instruments capable of viewing Ganymede in a way that was not possible before,” said lead researcher Scott Bolton, an aerospace scientist at the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, He said in a NASA statement. “By flying so close, we will take Ganymede’s exploration into the 21st century.”
Related: Image of Ganymede, Jupiter’s largest moon
Ganymede is a beautiful world for scientists. Even though it has a body like the moon, it is bigger than a small planet Mercury It is the only moon that has a magnetic field, a bubble of charged particles called the magnetosphere. So far, this is the only spacecraft to get a close look at NASA’s twin Ganymede Cruise in 1979 and the Galileo spacecraft that flew on the moon in 2000.
The Jovian supermoon will be the primary target of the European Space Agency’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer mission, known as jus, which is scheduled to launch next year and reach the Jupiter system in 2029. But that’s a long wait, and Juno, which launched in 2011, brings far more powerful technology than the Voyagers and Galileo spacecraft.
So the scientists happily took advantage of Juno’s opportunity. During the flyby, several instruments of the spacecraft will monitor Ganymede, including three different cameras, a radio instrument, an ultraviolet spectrophotometer (UVS), a Jovian Infrared Auroral Mapper (JIRAM), and a microwave radiometer (MWR).
The measurements of this last instrument are of great interest to scientists, who hope to use them to identify various components in the lighter and darker parts of Ganymede’s icy crust.
And between cameras studying the moon, of course it will be the same JunoCam Which captured stunning photos of the gas giant throughout the mission. However, since the icy moon will appear and fade in just 25 minutes, mission scientists expect the instrument to only be able to take five images of Ganymede during the encounter.
But despite the unusual excitement of the moon fly, Juno’s scientists could not forget the important milestone that approached after Ganymede’s investigation, when the spacecraft made it fly again from its usual target. Jupiter Self.
“Literally every second counts,” Matt Johnson, Juno mission manager at JPL, said in the same statement. “On Monday, we will be racing near Ganymede at about 12 miles per second (19 kilometers per second). In less than 24 hours, we made our 33rd science trajectory to Jupiter – a low scream above the cloud tops, at about 36 miles per second (58). kilometers per second).
This means Juno will zoom in on Ganymede at about 43,200 mph (69,523 km/h) and then circle Jupiter at 129,600 mph (208,571 km/h). But Juno was up for it, Johnson said.
“It’s going to be a wild trip.”
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