NASA’s Juno spacecraft accomplished its shut flyby of Jupiter’s moon Europa on Thursday, and the primary pictures from the maneuver have now arrived on Earth to your viewing pleasure.

The pictures have been taken yesterday at about 5:36 a.m. ET, from 219 miles above the moon’s floor. That makes Juno’s shut cross only a shade farther from Europa than the Galileo spacecraft’s flyby of the moon over 20 years in the past, 218 miles from Europa’s floor.

“It’s very early in the process, but by all indications, Juno’s flyby of Europa was a great success,” mentioned Scott Bolton, Juno principal investigator from the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, Texas, in a NASA release. “This first picture is just a glimpse of the remarkable new science to come from Juno’s entire suite of instruments and sensors that acquired data as we skimmed over the moon’s icy crust.”

Europa is barely smaller than Earth’s moon and of eager scientific curiosity. Its floor is a frozen wasteland miles thick, however scientists assume {that a} salty ocean lies beneath its floor. If that’s true, then Europa’s subsurface can be a great spot for all times to cover out. Just because the Perseverance rover on Mars is scouring a dried-up river delta for indicators of fossil life, so too does NASA assume Europa is price investigating.

Juno picked out floor options—rugged terrain and attainable affect craters—in its two-hour window zipping previous Europa. Candy Hansen, a co-investigator on Juno on the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Arizona, mentioned in a NASA launch that the photographs shall be in comparison with pictures of the moon taken on earlier missions, like Galileo in 2000. The staff can examine whether or not any options of Europa’s floor have modified in that point.

Hansen added that the latest pictures will assist exchange older, lower-resolution pictures of Europa’s floor.

The pictures additionally pave the best way for NASA’s Europa Clipper mission. That spacecraft is ready to launch in 2024 and arrive at Europa in 2030. It will examine the moon’s floor, environment, and, most intriguingly, its inside.

Studying the moon’s inside will assist scientists perceive the construction of Europa’s ice beneath the crust, in addition to the place liquid water could lie beneath the floor.

Ultimately, the Europa Clipper will give NASA scientists a gist of the planet’s habitability, within the company’s bigger seek for life past Earth.

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