NASA’s Juno spacecraft has captured the first images of the north pole of Jupiter’s Ganymede, which is the largest moon in the solar system. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory division’s official Twitter profile shared Ganymede’s picture and it is gorgeous. Jupiter’s moon Ganymede was discovered in 1610. It has a diameter of 5,268 km that is 8 percent larger than the diameter of Mercury and Pluto.
The Jovian Infrared Auroral Mapper (JIRAM) instrument that captured to enthralling picture has three main layers:
a sphere of metallic iron at the center, a spherical shell of rock (mantle) surrounding the core, and a spherical shell of mostly ice surrounding the rock shell and the core. The ice shell on the outside is very thick, maybe 800 km (497 miles) thick, as reported by sci-news.com.
According to the statement, Ganymede is the only moon in the solar system with its own magnetic field. The image highlights how the ice at and surrounding Ganymede’s north pole has been modified by the precipitation of plasma. Alessandro Mura, a Juno co-investigator at the National Institute for Astrophysics in Rome added, “It is a phenomenon that we have been able to learn about for the first time with Juno because we are able to see the north pole in its entirety.”
For the first time ever, @NASAJuno imaged the north pole of the largest moon in the solar system: Jupiter's moon Ganymede. https://t.co/IQZxjJpdaI pic.twitter.com/7qxNTgGQA6
— NASA JPL (@NASAJPL) July 23, 2020
The statement adds that the revelations by Juno and JIRAM will benefit further missions to Jupiter. Giuseppe Sindoni, program manager of the JIRAM instrument for the Italian Space Agency added, “These data are another example of the great science Juno is capable of when observing the moons of Jupiter.”
Ganymede is the largest moon in our solar system, larger even than the planet Mercury. It was discovered by Galileo Galilei on 7 January 1610 along with three other Jovian moons. These were the first moons found to orbit a planet other than Earth.
