The Solar System’s largest moon pictures have been captured by NASA’s Juno spacecraft at Jupiter this week got to within 645 miles/1000 kilometers of Ganymede. This is the 33rd time that the spacecraft’s JunoCam went close to Jupiter to take pictures in just 25 minutes which is long enough for five exposures. In the pictures that have been taken on the patterned surface, Ganymede’s crater is smaller than Mars and bigger than Mercury. The Juno team has a record of taking pictures from the last 20 years and now they will compare them to one another to look at any kind of change that might have occurred since Ganymede was last photographed. The measured diameter of Ganymede is around 3,273 miles/5,268 kilometers which are larger than both
Pluto and Mercury and the third are smaller than Mars. This has been said that it’s the ninth-largest size of any object in the Solar System. Juno has raced past Ganymede at 12 miles/19 kilometers per second and on the next day, it skimmed the cloud tops of Jupiter at 36 miles/58 kilometers per second. The Mission Manager Matt Johnson of JPL has said on Monday that, “Things usually happen pretty quickly in the world of flybys… every second count”. Ganymede is the largest and most massive of the solar system’s moon. Its diameter is 5,268 km which is making it 26% larger than the planet Mercury.
This is the only moon to have a magnetic field and the lowest moment of inertia force. These icy Jovian moons were discovered by Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei in 1610. It does have thin oxygen but not enough to survive there, however single-cell microbial life could exist in its buried ocean. Apparently, it is the 7th satellite and the third of the Galilean moons. Ganymede rotated Jupiter in roughly seven days and the other being Europa, Callisto, and Io. The pictures of Ganymede show that its ice shell has some light and some of its parts are dark. The light area is
pure ice while the other areas contain dirty ice which looks dark. The Ganymede’s ocean is figured to be 60 miles/100 kilometers thick and buried under an icy crust about 95 miles/150 kilometers thick. This is 10 times deeper than Earth’s ocean and contains more water than is found on earth. Juno Principal Investigator Scott Bolton has stated that “MWR will provide the first in-depth investigation of how the composition and structure of the ice vary with depth to understand how these ice shells made”. To know more about this article stay connected to us.
