NASA’s Juno spacecraft captured a large, dark shadow of Ganymede, Jupiter’s largest moon.
NASA said that Juno flew by the radiation-emitting planet Jupiter for the fortieth time on February 25, with the initial images resulting from the encounter being sent to Earth.
She explained that the Juno spacecraft was flying from a distance of 71,000 km above the tops of the Jupiter cloud during the confrontation, which is approximately 15 times closer than the orbital distance of Ganymede, which is 1.1 million km.
She added that the JunoCam instrument captured this image from a very close distance from Jupiter, which makes Ganymede’s shadow look particularly large.
It is noteworthy that the Juno spacecraft was launched from Earth in 2011, and reached Jupiter five years later, and the main goal is to understand the origin and evolution of this planet.