We Just Got Our Closest View of Europa in 20 Years, And We Can't Stop Staring

There is a large icy moon that is in the vicinity of Jupiter.

It's the closest we've come to seeing the frozen world in more than two decades.

Jupiter is the largest planet in the solar system.

The probe was used by the team to learn more about Jupiter's moons.

During the flyby, Juno took high-resolution images of the surface.

NASA's Galileo was last seen in 2000

"This first picture is just a glimpse of the remarkable new science to come from Juno's entire suite of instruments and sensors that acquired data as we skimmed over the moon's icy crust," Scott said.

The first images from the close approach to the moon were sent back to Earth.

Important insights about the frozen world are provided by the fresh snapshots and Galileo images.

Europa, two decades after our last visit

The closest approach by the craft was at 5:36 am.

The sun reflected off Jupiter to provide enough light for the probe's camera to take pictures.

The above left image was taken by Galileo in 1997 and shows the diversity of the surface geology.

There is a picture of the probe looking towards the moon. The moon's surface is shown in both images.

Researchers hope to see how the moon has changed over time by comparing the new images to previous ones.

The science team will be looking at the images from previous missions to see if the surface features have changed over the past two decades.

Existing low-resolution coverage of the area will be replaced by the images from the Juno cam.

The ice shell is between 10 and 15 miles in thickness.

The salty ocean is believed to be up to 100 miles deep. Liquid water is one of the essential ingredients for all living organisms.

NASA says that Jupiter has instruments that can peer beneath the ice crust to gather data.

The Galileo spacecraft took a close-up image of Europa in 1997 and you can see the cracks on the surface.

There were geysers of water coming out of that shell. Scientists hope the images from Thursday's flyby capture the shooting from the surface.

NASA's Europa Clipper probe, which is set to launch in 2024 to obtain more data on the ocean beneath its icy crust and how it interacts with the surface, could be influenced by what the flyby tells them.

Thanks to the ingenuity of the navigation team, Juno's trajectory was adjusted to cross the Jovian moon's orbit at the right time. Gregory Dubos is a systems engineer.

Scientists may be able to determine if the interior ocean exists and if the moon has the potential to be a good place to live.

The original article was published by Business Insider.

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