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NASA’s Juno spacecraft has now made its second close-up visit to Jupiter’s moon Io in less than two Earth months.
REPUBLIKA.CO.ID, JAKARTA — NASA’s Juno spacecraft has now made its second close visit to Jupiter’s moon, Io, in less than two months on Earth. To mark the encounter, NASA and the Southwest Research Institute released a new set of images showing the notorious moon in a seemingly uncharacteristic state of calm.
Reported SpaceThursday (8/2/2024), scientists also released a video showing Juno’s gradual approach to the planet’s satellite Jovian, a ball filled with points of light from volcanic eruptions.
Juno was launched in 2011 and entered orbit around Jupiter in 2016. Each orbit takes Juno on a highly elliptical circle, allowing it to circle Jupiter’s poles before rotating further away from the planet. The spacecraft’s to-do list related to Jupiter was originally completed in 2021, but NASA expanded the mission with the goal of exploring some of the world’s larger moons.
Io is one of those moons. This spacecraft first passed within 1,500 kilometers of the moon in December 2023, closer than any other spacecraft, except NASA’s Galileo spacecraft in 2001. Over the past few days, Juno has successfully completed its first orbit. 58. That means the spacecraft has now made a second pass at that distance.
Io had the misfortune of being the object of a great gravitational play, as the colossal Jupiter and its moon Europa tugged on Io’s interior and made it a hotbed of volcanic activity. But we don’t really know what this process actually looks like.
Some scientists, for example, believe that Io has a global ocean of magma beneath its surface. Others argue that superheated, dense metal cores power volcanoes.
By using Juno to study Io, Juno scientists hope they can determine how the planet and its volcanoes actually move.
Juno’s mission extension will now last until September 2025. If another extension is not planned, its operators will deorbit it into the gas giant’s atmosphere.
