The Juno spacecraft captures the reddest object in the Solar System

May 14. () –

NASA’s Juno mission captured the tiny Jovian moon Amaltheawhich has the distinction of being the reddest object in the solar system, during a flyby of Jupiter on March 7.

With a radius of only 84 kilometers, Amalthea is shaped like a potato and lacks mass to become a sphere. In 2000, NASA’s Galileo spacecraft revealed some surface features, including impact craters, hills, and valleys. Amalthea orbits Jupiter within the orbit of Io, which is the innermost of the planet’s four largest moons. and it takes 0.498 Earth days to complete one orbit.

Amalthea is the reddest object in the solar system and observations indicate that it emits more heat than it receives from the Sun. This may be because, while orbiting within Jupiter’s powerful magnetic field, electric currents are induced in the moon’s core. Alternatively, the heat could be due to the tides caused by Jupiter’s gravity.

At the time the first of the two images was taken, the Juno spacecraft was about 265,000 kilometers above Jupiter’s cloud topsat a latitude about 5 degrees north of the equator.

Citizen scientist Gerald Eichstädt created these images using raw data from the JunoCam instrument, applying processing techniques to improve the clarity of the images, NASA reports.