NASA’s probe saw this when it flew over Ganymede, Jupiter’s moon قمر

NASA’s Juno space probe, orbiting Jupiter, has managed to capture new images Ganymede moon pictures during a nearby flight. This natural moon, the largest moon in the solar system, has an icy surface covering the interior of rock and iron.

Juno had less than half an hour to observe Ganymede up close, enough time to take five pictures, if all went well. The image above, taken by the visible-light imager JunoCam, covers about 0.97 kilometers of the moon per pixel. Lines of icy plains, huge crater marks, and long lines (possibly tectonic in origin, according to NASA) are visible in this dramatic landscape.

Scott Bolton, Juno Principal Investigator at the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, US, said in Release from NASA. “We’ll take our time before drawing scientific conclusions, but until then we can simply marvel at this heavenly treasure, the only moon in our solar system larger than Mercury.”

The image was taken with the green filter on JunoCam. There are still images that can be seen using the red and blue camera filters, which when put together will give us a color image of Ganymede. They’ve also released an image of Ganymede’s dark side, captured by Juno’s Stellar Reference Unit navigation camera.

In addition to these views of the surface of Jupiter’s moon, one of the planet’s 79 known satellites, the NASA team is awaiting data from the probe about Ganymede’s upper atmosphere and magnetosphere. Although it looks a lot like Earth’s moon at first glance, this orb is more complex: it’s the only moon known to have a magnetic field, and scientists also believe it does. Ocean Underground salty.