NASA's Juno Mission Spots Jupiter's Tiny Moon Amalthea
Date
5/14/2024 3:13:57 PM
(MENAFN- AzerNews) NASA's Juno mission captured these views of Jupiter during its59th close flyby of the giant planet on March 7, 2024, Azernews reports citing to the official website ofthe organization.
With a radius of just 52 miles (84 kilometers), Amalthea has apotato-like shape, lacking the mass to pull itself into a sphere 2000, NASA's Galileo spacecraft revealed some surface features,including impact craters, hills, and valleys. Amalthea circlesJupiter inside Io's orbit, which is the innermost of the planet'sfour largest moons, taking 0.498 Earth days to complete oneorbit.
Amalthea is the reddest object in the solar system, andobservations indicate it gives out more heat than it receives fromthe Sun. This may be because, as it orbits within Jupiter'spowerful magnetic field, electric currents are induced in themoon's core. Alternatively, the heat could be from tidal stressescaused by Jupiter's gravity.
At the time that the first of these two images was taken, theJuno spacecraft was about 165,000 miles (265,000 kilometers) aboveJupiter's cloud tops, at a latitude of about 5 degrees north of theequator.
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