Oct. 1 () –
NASA has captured the sharpest image ever taken of Earth’s radiation belts: fringes of charged particles trapped in the Earth’s magnetic shield, or magnetosphere.
The instrument Jovian Energetic Neutrals and Ions (JENI), built by the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL), took the image while ESA’s Juice probe – on which it is installed – was moving away from the Earth heading to the moons of Jupiter.
What he captured is invisible to the human eye. Unlike traditional cameras that rely on light, JENI uses special sensors to capture energetic neutral atoms emitted by charged particles interacting with atmospheric hydrogen gas surrounding the Earth. The JENI instrument is the evolution of a similar instrument on NASA’s Cassini mission that revealed the magnetospheres of Saturn and Jupiter.
“As soon as we saw the new clear images, we all greeted each other with applause,” he said in a statement Matina Gkioulidou, Deputy Director of JENI at APL. “It was clear that we had captured the vast ring of hot plasma surrounding Earth in unprecedented detail, an achievement that has sparked excitement for what is to come at Jupiter.”
On August 19, JENI and its companion Jovian Energetic Electrons (JoEE) particle instrument made the most of their brief 30-minute encounter with the Moon. As Juice approached just 750 kilometers above the lunar surface, instruments collected data on the interaction of the space environment with our closest celestial companion. It’s an interaction that scientists hope to see magnified on Jupiter’s moons, as the gas giant’s radiation-rich magnetosphere flies overhead.
On August 20, Juice hurtled toward Earth’s magnetosphere, passing about 60,000 kilometers above the Pacific Ocean, where the instruments got their first taste of the harsh environment that awaits Jupiter. Passing through the magnetic tail, JoEE and JENI encountered the dense, lower-energy plasma characteristic of this region before plunging into the heart of the radiation belts. There, the instruments They measured the million-degree plasma that surrounds the Earth to investigate the secrets of plasma heating that are known to fuel dramatic phenomena in planetary magnetospheres.
Now, after utilizing the gravity of the Moon and Earth, Juice’s trajectory has been successfully adjusted for a future encounter with Venus in August 2025. That flyby of Venus will serve as a gravitational slingshot, propelling Juice back to Earth and preparing it for two additional flybys in September 2026 and January 2029. Only then will the spacecraft, now propelled at full speed, It will make its grand arrival at Jupiter in July 2031.
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