The spacecraft will see Io again in October before setting up for what Juno's lead scientist, Scott Bolton, calls the "climax" of the campaign-the 1,500-kilometer flybys set for December 30 and February 3. In May, Juno flew less than 22,000 miles (35,000 kilometers) from Io, followed by the closer flyby on July 30. ![]() Io, slightly larger than Earth's Moon, will get the most sustained look from Juno, which started long-distance observations of the volcanic moon last year. One of its top science results was finding evidence for a large, potentially dissolved core inside Jupiter, upending a hypothesis that Jupiter had a smaller, solid core at its center. Its original goal was to study Jupiter's atmosphere and deep interior. The $1.1 billion Juno mission launched 12 years ago this week and arrived in orbit around Jupiter on July 4, 2016. Juno's science instruments were active for the flyby, with the spacecraft's infrared mapping instrument tuned to detect heat signatures from volcanic eruptions and lava flows and an optical imaging camera taking long-range pictures of Io. The most recent flyby on July 30 brought the solar-powered Juno probe about 13,700 miles (22,000 kilometers) from Io's tortured surface. NASA's robotic Juno spacecraft is delivering the fresh data on Io with a series of flybys, each getting closer to Jupiter's volcanic moon until a pair of close-up encounters at a range of less than 1,000 miles (about 1,500 kilometers) in December and February. That means there's a good chance something on Io has changed since NASA's Galileo orbiter last encountered it in 2002. Most planetary bodies in our Solar System wouldn't exhibit so much change in a couple of decades.īut Io is different, with volcanic eruptions regularly remaking parts of the moon's crust. ![]() The last time a spacecraft got this close to Jupiter's moon Io was more than 20 years ago, a blink of an eye on a typical geological timescale. NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/Thomas Thomopoulos reader comments 57 with
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