Juno’s Ganymede Close-up

This image of the Jovian moon Ganymede was obtained by the JunoCam imager aboard NASA's Juno spacecraft during its June 7, 2021, flyby of the icy moon. At the time of closest approach, Juno was within 645 miles (1,038 kilometers) of its surface – closer to Jupiter's largest moon than any other spacecraft has come in more than two decades.

This image is a preliminary product – Ganymede as seen through JunoCam's green filter. Juno is a spin-stabilized spacecraft (with a rotation rate of 2 rpm), and the JunoCam imager has a fixed field of view. To obtain Ganymede images as Juno rotated, the camera acquired a strip at a time as the target passed through its field of view. These image strips were captured separately through the red, green, and blue filters. To generate the final image product, the strips must be stitched together and colors aligned.

At the time this preliminary image was generated, the "spice kernels" (navigation and other ancillary information providing precision observation geometry) necessary to properly map-project the imagery were not available. The red, and blue filtered image strips were also not available. When the final spice kernel data and images from the two filters are incorporated, the images seams (most prevalent on lower right of sphere) will disappear and a complete color image will be generated.

More information about Juno is at https://www.nasa.gov/juno and https://missionjuno.swri.edu.