NASA’s Juno Spacecraft Is About to Make a Close Flyby of Icy Moon Europa

Juno has orbited Jupiter since July 2016, but on Thursday the spacecraft will flip its consideration away from the gasoline large to make a shut method to one among Jupiter’s most intriguing moons: Europa. Astrobiologists assume it’s attainable that the Galilean moon may host some type of life in a salty ocean beneath its frozen crust.

NASA’s Juno spacecraft is scheduled to make its shut flyby of Europa on Thursday at 5:36 a.m. ET. It will come to inside 222 miles (358 kilometers) of the floor and will seize a number of the highest-decision photos ever taken of Europa, together with invaluable information on the moon’s inside, ice-covered floor, and ambiance.

Thursday’s flyby would be the closest a NASA spacecraft has come to Europa in additional than 20 years. On January 3, 2000, the Galileo spacecraft flew inside 218 miles (351 kilometers) of Europa throughout its mission to review Jupiter and its moons.

Jupiter boasts round 80 moons, and the most important 4 are often called the Galilean moons. Though Europa is the smallest of the Galilean bunch, scientists have lengthy suspected that it may host life in a international ocean beneath its water-ice crust. Europa has a comparatively clean floor, and its ambiance is generally made up of oxygen (though too skinny for us people to breathe). The moon’s magnetic discipline helps shield it from Jupiter’s radiation, creating doubtlessly liveable situations.

Juno will peer beneath Europa’s water-ice crust, gathering information on its composition and temperature, according to NASA. The spacecraft can be set to take 4 visible-light photos of the moon with its JunoCam, which the science workforce will evaluate with earlier photos to see if there have been any adjustments on Europa’s floor prior to now twenty years. During the flyby, Juno might be in Europa’s shadow, however daylight mirrored off Jupiter will present sufficient mild for imaging.

The information acquired through the flyby will feed into an upcoming mission devoted solely to Europa. NASA is planning to launch the Europa Clipper spacecraft in October 2024, which can conduct a sequence of flybys of the moon whereas orbiting Jupiter.

Juno’s flyby of Europa will modify the spacecraft’s trajectory, lowering the period of time it takes Juno to finish an orbit of Jupiter from 43 to 38 days. “The relative velocity between spacecraft and moon will be 14.7 miles per second (23.6 kilometers per second), so we are screaming by pretty fast,” John Bordi, Juno deputy mission supervisor at Jet Propulsion Laboratory, stated in a press release. “All steps have to go like clockwork to successfully acquire our planned data, because soon after the flyby is complete, the spacecraft needs to be reoriented for our upcoming close approach of Jupiter, which happens only 7 ½ hours later.”

We’ll be ready for these Europa photos to beam again from the Juno spacecraft, which has already delivered many beautiful views of Jupiter’s swirling winds and large storms.

More: How Juno’s Breathtaking Jupiter Images Are Made