SPACE reports that on Monday at 1:35 p.m. EDT, NASA’s Juno spacecraft will come within 645 miles of Jupiter’s moon Ganymede. Ganymede is the largest moon in the solar system, and “the only moon to sport a magnetic field, a bubble of charged particles dubbed a magnetosphere.” No probe “has gotten a good view of Jupiter’s largest moon since 2000, when NASA’s Galileo spacecraft swung past” the moon. The moon “will be a main target of the European Space Agency’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer mission, known as JUICE, which is due to launch next year and arrive in the Jupiter system in 2029.” During the flyby, “several of the spacecraft’s instruments will observe Ganymede, including three different cameras, radio instruments, the Ultraviolet Spectrograph (UVS), the Jovian Infrared Auroral Mapper (JIRAM) instruments and the Microwave Radiometer (MWR).”
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Tag: Juno spacecraft
NASA Extends Juno, Mars InSight Missions
CNET News reported that NASA said Friday that it has extended the missions of the Juno spacecraft and the Mars InSight lander. Juno, “which launched in 2011, was scheduled to end its mission by deorbiting into Jupiter in July 2021.” The spacecraft will “now continue its work studying the gas giant until September 2025 or the end of its life, whichever comes first. The extension also comes with a mission expansion to investigate Jupiter’s rings and some of its biggest moons.” NASA also “extended InSight’s mission through December 2022. The lander team will focus on gathering seismic and weather data, and may continue to work on the heat probe issue as a lower priority.”
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