Closest Image of Ganymede in 20 Years Captured by Juno

Ganymede is Jupiter's largest and most massive Moon , in fact it's the largest and most massive Moon in our Solar System , it has a diameter of about half that of Earth and is the only Moon known to have a magnetic field plus it's believed to have more water than Earth ... except on Ganymede it's water is locked beneath an icy shell.

This new image was captured on June 7, 2021.

“This is the closest any spacecraft has come to this mammoth moon in a generation,” said Juno Principal Investigator Scott Bolton of the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. “We are going to take our time before we draw any scientific conclusions, but until then we can simply marvel at this celestial wonder.”

Using its green filter, the spacecraft’s JunoCam visible-light imager captured almost an entire side of the water-ice-encrusted moon. Later, when versions of the same image come down incorporating the camera’s red and blue filters, imaging experts will be able to provide a color portrait of Ganymede. Image resolution is about 0.6 miles (1 kilometer) per pixel.

In addition, Juno’s Stellar Reference Unit, a navigation camera that keeps the spacecraft on course, provided a black-and-white picture of Ganymede’s dark side (the side opposite the Sun) bathed in dim light scattered off Jupiter. Image resolution is between 0.37 to 0.56 miles (600 to 900 meters) per pixel.

“The conditions in which we collected the dark side image of Ganymede were ideal for a low-light camera like our Stellar Reference Unit,” said Heidi Becker, Juno’s radiation monitoring lead at JPL. “So this is a different part of the surface than seen by JunoCam in direct sunlight. It will be fun to see what the two teams can piece together.”
www.nasa.gov...

It also make a nice desktop background.

a reply to: gortex

That was pretty mad to zoom in on 👍🏼

Lots of strange lines when zoomed in, but i guess that would be the frozen water crust?

a reply to: FinallyAwake

Lots of strange lines when zoomed in, but i guess that would be the frozen water crust?

I guess some of them are frozen over cracks as a result of the stresses and strains of its orbit of Jupiter.

A lot of contrast in the surface material.

Interesting.

I wonder if the difference is just ice presence.

a reply to: gortex

I saw it up a lot closer on the Expanse (TV series) JK

a reply to: gortex

Ganymede! Cool! Thanks, Gortex!

a reply to: gortex

Amazing, some very similar features to our moon, even has it's own Tycho crater like feature in Southern hemisphere.

my guess is that the infant moon kept collecting ice crystals as comets fell onto the gravity well

liquid water existed in secomds/minutes after the impacts, then eons of ice build up allowed the deep layers of ice to get squeezed by the mother planets' gravitational forces' ... and eventually a deep pool of liquid water exists, water ice from the oort cloud no doubt

yum

The darker spots must be the oldest surface; being covered in dust making the ice look darker.
It is also where there seems to be more features of compression and wavy lines and also showing the most meteoric impacts with lots being partially refilled.

The paler regions look very smooth in long stretches or with long straight lines.

a reply to: gortex

Awesome! I wonder what kind of life is below the ice surface and in the, likely, warmer waters.

I found Hale-Bopp on the interactive part on that NASA link. It'll be the year 4385 before Earth sees it again.

That's an amazing picture Gortex. Thank you for sharing

a reply to: gortex

Very Cool! S&F!

Amazing to think people want to travel to distant solar systems when we don't even know about our own yet!