During a close pass by Jupiter last February, the Juno spacecraft caught Ganymede’s shadow on the planet. The spacecraft was about 71,000 km above the cloud tops, only 6 to 7 % the distance between Jupiter and Ganymede.
An observer inside the oval shadow on Jupiter’s cloud tops would see a total eclipse of the Sun. Jupiter has four large moons (Ganymede, Io, Callisto, and Europa) that often pass between Jupiter and the Sun, so the moon shadows are often fall on the planet.
Image Credit—
Data: NASA / JPL / SwRI / MSSS
Image processing: Thomas Thomopoulos © CC BY
This image taken by Juno’s Stellar Reference Unit during the spacecraft’s 29 September, 2022, flyby of Jupiter’s moon Europa show surface never seen before.
This one was taken by Voyager 1 during its flyby in 1979.
Hubble witnessed the collision of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 with Jupiter in 1994. This is a composite photo assembled from separate images of Jupiter and the comet. The comet had broken up into at least 21 separate fragments. When fragment G struck Jupiter, the impact created a giant dark spot roughly the same diameter as the Earth and was estimated to have released an energy equivalent to 6,000,000 megatons of TNT (600X the Earth’s entire nuclear arsenal).
This false color view from the JWST’s NIRCam instrument’s 2.12 micron filter shows the distinct bands that encircle Jupiter and the planet’s Great Red Spot. The iconic spot appears white in this image because of the way the infrared image was processed. The moon Europa is visible on the left, and its shadow can be seen to the left of the Great Red Spot.
We’re used to seeing Jupiter with its Giant Red Spot, but that storm was out of view when the Juno spacecraft caught the shadow of the moon Ganymede on the planet’s cloud tops.
Yep. It’s another picture of Jupiter’s Giant Red Spot. It was taken over 40 years ago by Voyager 1 as it flew by on its way to Saturn and beyond.
Callisto is the one of the Galilean moons of Jupiter, the second largest. Its surface is old, showing the highest coverage by impact craters of any large body in the Solar System, but it has no volcanoes or large mountains. Callisto’s surface is one large ice-field, littered with cracksand craters from billions of years of collisions. This picture was taken in 2001 by the Galileo spacecraft.
The Juno Cam aboard the Juno spacecraft snapped this picture on Jupiter’s moon Ganymede on the 7th.