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A NASA spaceship is preparing for the first series of dense encounters with the largest mole in the solar system. Juno’s spacecraft will fly by Jupiter’s moon on Thursday the 15th.
It will be one run nine flybys of Ion have been made by Juno in the last year and a half. The two encounters will be just 930 miles (1,500 kilometers) from the moon’s surface.
Juno captured a brighter view of Ion on July 5 from 50,000 miles (80,000 kilometers). The brightest spots in that image correspond to the hottest temperatures on Io, which is home to hundreds of volcanoes — some of which can shoot lava fountains twelve miles high.
Scientists will use observations of Juno to learn more about the volcano network and how its eruptions intersect with Jupiter. The Moon constantly pulls a huge gravitational pull from Jupiter.
“The team is excited to extend the Juno mission to include the study of Jupiter’s moons. With each close flyby, we were able to obtain a wealth of new information,” said Scott Bolton, Juno principal investigator at the Southern Research Institute in San Antonio, in a statement.
“One of the sensors is designed to study Jupiter, but we’re impressed that they can do double duty by observing Jupiter’s moons.”
The spacecraft recently captured a new image of Jupiter’s northern cyclone on September 29. Jupiter’s atmosphere is dominated by hundreds of cyclones and many are clustered at the planet’s poles.
Juno has been orbiting Jupiter since 2016 to uncover more details about the giant planet and is targeting flybys of Jupiter’s moons during the extended part of its mission, which began last year and is expected to last through the end of 2025.
Juno Ganymede flew by Jupiter’s moon in 2021, followed by Europa earlier this year. The rover used its instruments to look beneath the icy crust of both moons and gather information about the interior of Europa, where a salty ocean is thought to exist.
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The ice shell that makes up Europa’s surface is between 10 and 15 miles (16 and 24 kilometers) thick, and the ocean it sits on top of is likely estimated to be 40 to 100 miles (64 to 161 kilometers) deep.
The data and images captured by Juno may help support two separate missions that will look at Jupiter’s moons in the next two years: the European Space Agency’s Jupiter ICy lunar explorer and NASA’s Europa Clipper mission.
The first, expected to launch in April 2023, will spend three years thoroughly exploring Jupiter and its three icy moons — Ganymede, Callisto and Europa. All three moons are thought to have oceans beneath ice-covered crusts, and scientists want to explore whether Ganymede’s ocean is potentially habitable.
The Europa Clipper will launch in 2024 for a series of 50 flybys around the moon, after arriving in the 2030s. Finally, passing from an altitude of 1,700 miles (2,736 kilometers) to just 16 miles (26 kilometers) above the moon’s surface, Europa Clipper may be able to help scientists determine whether an interior ocean really exists there and if the moon could support life.
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