NASA recently extended Juno s mission operations to 2025 on June 9, 2021, 9:41
In brief: NASA has shared the first two images captured by its Juno Spacecraft earlier this week as it zipped by Jupiter’s largest moon, Ganymede. The flyby happened on June 7 and is the closest a spacecraft has come to Jupiter’s icy moon in more than two decades.
Juno Principal Investigator Scott Bolton of the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio said they are going to take their time before drawing any scientific conclusions from the images, but for now, “we can simply marvel at this celestial wonder.”
The images – one from the orbiter’s JunoCam imager and the other from its Stellar Reference Unit star camera – highlight craters, dark and light spots on the terrain and what NASA believes could be structural features linked to tectonic faults.
On June 7th, NASA's Juno will be the closest spacecraft to visit the Jupiter's largest satellite, Ganymede, since the Galileo spacecraft made a close approach more than two decades ago. It will pass within 645 miles (1,038 km) of Jupiter's moon surface, and it will make sure to document the satellite's composition, ionosphere, magnetosphere, and ice shell.
In June of 2020, an amateur astronomer named Clyde Foster from Centurion, South Africa, made a very significant discovery with his 14-inch telescope when he noticed a strange “spot” located to the southeast of Jupiter’s “Great Red Spot”.
Just two days after Foster’s discovery, NASA’s Juno spacecraft performed detailed observations of the new and mysterious feature. According to Juno’s observations, scientists confirmed that it was a plume of cloud material that erupted over the top layer of Jupiter’s atmosphere. These “outbreaks” sometimes occur in the planet’s latitude band which is called the South Temperate Belt. A few weeks after the plume subsided, it appeared as a dark spot which has been named “Clyde’s Spot”.
NASA's probe, Juno, has discovered the wild look on Jupiter's Clyde's Spot. For a while, NASA has been in a close encounter with Jupiter through its Juno spacecraft.