Jupiter’s moon Ganymede is an intriguing place. Tomorrow, the Juno probe will perform a flyby of it, providing the closest encounter in decades.
Jupiter’s satellite Ganymede is an intriguing place: It is the largest moon in the solar system, being bigger than Mercury, and unusually for a moon it has its own atmosphere and magnetic field. Tomorrow, June 7, the Jupiter exploration probe Juno will perform a flyby of the moon, providing the closest encounter with it in decades. No mission has come this close to Ganymede in over 20 years, since the Galileo spacecraft made a final close approach in 2000. It was this mission that discovered the moon’s magnetic field and captured the data used to make the maps illustrated at the top of this page. More recently, the New Horizons probe passed by Ganymede on its way to Pluto, picking up some readings as it went by in 2007. But to understand more about this intriguing place, we need to send more specific instruments there. That’s what Juno can offer, with its modern instruments like its Ultraviolet Spectrograph (UVS), Jovian Infrared Auroral Mapper (JIRAM), and Microwave Radiometer’s (MWR).
