NASA’s Juno will perform close flyby of Jupiter’s icy moon Europa

On Thursday, Sept. 29, at 2:36 a.m. PDT (5:36 a.m. EDT), NASA’s Juno spacecraft will come inside 222 miles (358 kilometers) of the floor of Jupiter’s ice-covered moon, Europa. The solar-powered spacecraft is predicted to acquire among the highest-resolution photos ever taken of parts of Europa’s floor, in addition to accumulate priceless information on the moon’s inside, floor composition, and ionosphere, together with its interplay with Jupiter’s magnetosphere.

Such info may gain advantage future missions, together with the company’s Europa Clipper, which is ready to launch in 2024 to review the icy moon. “Europa is such an intriguing Jovian moon, it’s the focus of its personal future NASA mission,” mentioned Juno Principal Investigator Scott Bolton of the Southwest Analysis Institute in San Antonio. “We’re blissful to supply information that will assist the Europa Clipper group with mission planning, in addition to present new scientific insights into this icy world.”

With an equatorial diameter of 1,940 miles (3,100 kilometers), Europa is about 90% the dimensions of Earth’s Moon. Scientists suppose a salty ocean lies beneath a miles-thick ice shell, sparking questions on potential situations able to supporting life beneath Europa’s floor.

The close flyby will modify Juno’s trajectory, lowering the time it takes to orbit Jupiter from 43 to 38 days. Will probably be the closest a NASA spacecraft has approached Europa since Galileo got here inside 218 miles (351 kilometers) on Jan. 3, 2000. As well as, this flyby marks the second encounter with a Galilean moon throughout Juno’s prolonged mission. The mission explored Ganymede in June 2021 and plans to make shut approaches of Io in 2023 and 2024.

Information assortment will start an hour previous to closest approach, when the spacecraft is 51,820 miles (83,397 kilometers) from Europa.

“The relative velocity between spacecraft and moon shall be 14.7 miles per second (23.6 kilometers per second), so we’re screaming by fairly quick,” mentioned John Bordi, Juno deputy mission supervisor at JPL. “All steps should go like clockwork to efficiently purchase our deliberate information, as a result of quickly after the flyby is full, the spacecraft must be reoriented for our upcoming shut strategy of Jupiter, which occurs solely 7 ½ hours later.”

The spacecraft’s full suite of devices and sensors shall be activated for the Europa encounter. Juno’s Jupiter Energetic-Particle Detector Instrument (JEDI) and its medium-gain (X-band) radio antenna will accumulate information on Europa’s ionosphere. Its Waves, Jovian Auroral Distributions Experiment (JADE), and Magnetometer (MAG) experiments will measure plasma within the moon’s wake as Juno explores Europa’s interplay with Jupiter’s magnetosphere.

MAG and Waves may even seek for potential water plumes above Europa’s floor. “We now have the best gear to do the job, however to seize a plume would require plenty of luck,” mentioned Bolton. “We now have to be on the proper place at simply the best time, but when we’re so lucky, it is a residence run for certain.”

Inside and Out

Juno’s Microwave Radiometer (MWR) will peer into Europa’s water-ice crust, acquiring information on its composition and temperature. That is the primary time such information could have been collected to review the moon’s icy shell.

As well as, the mission expects to take 4 visible-light photos of the moon with JunoCam (a public-engagement digital camera) throughout the flyby. The Juno science group will evaluate them to photographs from earlier missions, on the lookout for modifications in Europa’s floor options which may have occurred over the previous twenty years. These visible-light photos could have an anticipated decision higher than 0.6 miles (1 kilometer) per pixel.

Though Juno shall be in Europa’s shadow when closest to the moon, Jupiter’s environment will replicate sufficient daylight for Juno’s visible-light imagers to gather information. Designed to take photos of star fields and seek for bright stars with recognized positions to assist Juno get its bearings, the mission’s star digital camera (known as the Stellar Reference Unit) will take a high-resolution black-and-white picture of Europa’s floor. In the meantime, the Jovian Infrared Auroral Mapper (JIRAM) will try to gather infrared photos of its floor.

Juno’s closeup views and information from its MWR instrument will inform the Europa Clipper mission, which is able to carry out almost 50 flybys after it arrives at Europa in 2030. Europa Clipper will collect information on the moon’s environment, floor, and inside—info that scientists will use to higher perceive Europa’s international subsurface ocean, the thickness of its ice crust, and potential plumes that could be venting subsurface water into space.