I want to take a moment to share an amazing image of Jupiter’s moon Europa, taken by the Stellar Reference Unit (SRU) onboard NASA’s Juno spacecraft. On the way into perijove 45, or the 45th close flyby of Jupiter, Juno got closer to Europa than any spacecraft has since Galileo, and while JunoCam only took four images of the icy moon, Juno’s other instruments were hard at work, too.

Now, the most recent image release shows a small piece of Europa’s surface in fine detail, including double ridges, some darker stains, and a strange feature that looks like a musical quarter note. The image also shows white dots that are high-energy particles penetrating the surface. We’ll have a link to the press release in our show notes at DailySpace.org.

Juno’s next Galilean moon flyby will be Io in 2023, and these most recent images of Europa will likely be the best ones we have available until Europa Clipper arrives in the early 2030s. For now, though, we have some pretty awesome data coming from the Juno mission.

More Information

NASA JPL press release