NASA's Juno Spacecraft Sends Back First Images From Ganymede Flyby
takyon writes:
See the First Images NASA's Juno Took As It Sailed by Ganymede
The first two images from NASA Juno's June 7, 2021, flyby of Jupiter's giant moon Ganymede have been received on Earth. The photos - one from the Jupiter orbiter's JunoCam imager and the other from its Stellar Reference Unit star camera - show the surface in remarkable detail, including craters, clearly distinct dark and bright terrain, and long structural features possibly linked to tectonic faults.
"This is the closest any spacecraft has come to this mammoth moon in a generation," said Juno Principal Investigator Scott Bolton of the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. "We are going to take our time before we draw any scientific conclusions, but until then we can simply marvel at this celestial wonder."
[...] "The conditions in which we collected the dark side image of Ganymede were ideal for a low-light camera like our Stellar Reference Unit," said Heidi Becker, Juno's radiation monitoring lead at JPL. "So this is a different part of the surface than seen by JunoCam in direct sunlight. It will be fun to see what the two teams can piece together."
The spacecraft will send more images from its Ganymede flyby in the coming days, with JunoCam's raw images being made available here.
Also at NYT.
Previously: Close Encounters of the Jovian Kind: NASA's Juno to Get a Close Look at Jupiter's Moon Ganymede
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