See 7 Jaw-Dropping New Photos Of Jupiter And Its ‘Wet Moon’ Europa Taken This Week By NASA’s Juno

Another batch of stunning photos has just arrived back on Earth from Jupiter. They come in the wake of another spectacular cloud-top fly-by NASA’s spacecraft Juno, which not only photographed the giant planet, but also its fourth-largest moon Europa.

The images you see here are from aa team of incredibly talented and hard working “citizen scientists,” who after each perijove (close flyby) download the raw data from JunoCam—the spacecraft’s on-board two-megapixel camera—via the NASA mission’s special website.

NASA’s $1.1 billion spacecraft Juno spacecraft—in orbit of Jupiter since 2016—last made a distant encounter with Jupiter’s moon Europa in October 2021. Often referred to as the veiny eyeball moon because of its fractures in its icy surface, Europa—in some ways more like a planet than a moon—was passed by Juno at a distance of 29,000 miles/47,000 kilometers on February 24, 202 during the spacecraft’s 40th flyby.

Jupiter’s fourth largest of its 79 moons, Europa is about 1,900 miles/3,100 kilometers in diameter , so slightly smaller than our own Moon. However, it’s bigger than dwarf planet Pluto. It’s got a thin oxygen-rich atmosphere, a layered inner structure including a liquid iron core and a magnetic field.

Europa also has a global ocean of water beneath an 11 mile/18 kilometer thick crust of ice and is hence a target for NASA and others in their search for life off-Earth. It’s thought that Europa spews a plume of water from its ocean into space, like Enceladus at Saturn definitely does, but it’s not confirmed.

There are no fewer than two missions being planned to visit Europa in the wake of Juno’s mission, which is scheduled to end in late 2025. The European Space Agency’s JUpiter ICy moons Explorer (JUICE) will launch in May 2022, arrive in 2029 and take three and a half years to examine Europa as well as two of Jupiter’s other Galilean moons, Ganymede and Callisto.

Meanwhile, NASA’s Europa Clipper mission will launch in October 2024 and arrive in late 2027 to perform about 45 flybys, in each pass photographing the moon’s icy surface in high resolution. Both will likely sail through any plumes of water vapor detected to be erupting from Europa’s ice crust.

However, the next major close-up that scientists will get of Europa will be from Juno. In late September 2022 it will get to just 221 miles/355 kilometers) above Europa’s surface. Expect incredible images of the fractured icy veiny eyeball moon!

Wishing you clear skies and wide eyes.