The second photo comes courtesy of the Stellar Reference Unit, a black-and-white camera that Juno uses for navigation. The image is black and white, but the mission team will be able to create a color portrait once the versions taken with JunoCam’s red and blue filters come down, NASA officials said. The JunoCam photo, which has a resolution of about 0.6 miles (1 km) per pixel, was captured using the instrument’s green filter. Those other buried oceans are in contact with their moons’ rocky interiors, making a variety of complex chemical reactions possible, scientists say.)
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(That ocean is likely sandwiched between two ice layers, however, so it’s not as astrobiologically interesting as the subsurface seas of fellow Jupiter moon Europa and the Saturn satellite Enceladus. One of the images, snapped by the JunoCam instrument, shows nearly an entire side of the crater-pocked Ganymede, which is thought to harbor a huge ocean of liquid water beneath its ice shell. It’ll take some time to receive and process all the data from Monday’s encounter, but we’re already getting a taste: The first two photos from the flyby have come down to Earth, and NASA posted them online Tuesday (June 8). It was the closest any probe had come to Ganymede since May 2000, when NASA’s Galileo spacecraft got within about 620 miles (1,000 km) of the moon’s icy surface. On Monday (June 7), NASA’s Juno probe zoomed within just 645 miles (1,038 kilometers) of Jupiter’s enormous satellite Ganymede, which is bigger than the planet Mercury. The photos from a historic flyby of our solar system’s largest moon are starting to roll in.