Thanks to NASA’s Juno probe, humanity can now witness a bunch of breathtaking images of both Jupiter and its natural satellite Ganymede, meaning the largest moon from our Solar System. Juno has been closely analyzing Jupiter and Ganymede, closer than any other spacecraft has been in the last decades.
NASA itself reveals that the main goal of Juno is to make scientists learn more about the formation and evolution of Jupiter. The spacecraft is using long-proven technologies in an elliptical polar orbit to observe the magnetic fields and gravity of Jupiter, as well as other aspects.
NASA released a new video yesterday, and you can feel free of delighting your eyes on it below:
The official description says:
On June 7, 2021, NASA’s Juno spacecraft flew closer to Jupiter’s ice-encrusted moon Ganymede than any spacecraft in more than two decades. Less than a day later, Juno made its 34th flyby of Jupiter. This animation provides a “starship captain” point of view of each flyby. For both worlds, JunoCam images were orthographically projected onto a digital sphere and used to create the flyby animation. Synthetic frames were added to provide views of approach and departure for both Ganymede and Jupiter.
Ganymede is even bigger than Mercury, the first planet from the Sun. If Jupiter’s moon were not orbiting as the largest natural satellite of the gas giant, it could easily be considered a dwarf planet.
Jupiter is the largest planet from our Solar System, and although it’s a huge lifeless ball of gas, it’s still posing a point of interest for scientific explorations. Jupiter also has rings, it’s the fastest spinning planet from our Solar System, and perhaps the most amazing thing is that it has a magnetic field that’s 14 times stronger than the one on Earth.
