Jovian Moons [ID: 1]
There are at least 63 jovian moons! The largest four moons, Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto, are called the Galilean satellites because they were discovered by Galileo. We do not get close to them because Juno is in a polar orbit, but occasionally the spacecraft is close enough for images to be worthwhile. For example at PJ17 we imaged a volcanic plume erupting from Io!
50 Comments
Hopefully Juno can have close encounter with inner moons like Amalthea and Thebe in the future. The reason for this is to confirm their relationship with Jovian rings, which might gives us clues about how the rings formed, and provide clues to understand formation and evolution of Jupiter.
Are Ganymede and Io the most habitable moons (?) according to current evidence and despite distance, what precludes NASA from choosing one of these to populate instead of Mars (unless Mars is already a done-deal and we don't know all the info yet)?
I have a special curiosity in Gannimides
This seems a very interesting project as I tend to be more interested in 'rocky' 'planets' rather than gas ones. I would pleased to process images from this project. Best wishes to the Juno team.