NASA Just Dropped the First Close-Up Images of Europa in Decades and They're Stunning

Behold: the closest images of Jupiter’s moon Europa, considered one of the promising targets in the search for extraterrestrial life, in decades.

NASA’s Juno orbiter captured stunning new images of the moon during a flyby on Thursday that took the probe within 219 miles of its icy surface, revealing an intimate new view of a tantalizing world.

This altitude is only one mile higher than the closest shots ever taken of Europa, which were captured in the year 2000 at a distance of 218 miles from the surface by NASA’s Galileo probe. Juno snapped the shots during a brief two-hour window while traveling at a breakneck pace of 53,000 miles per hour. 

NASA released a shot of an equatorial region called Annwn Regio mere hours after it was taken on Thursday, and you can watch raw images of Juno’s flyby as they become available at this link.

“It’s very early in the process, but by all indications Juno’s flyby of Europa was a great success,” said Scott Bolton, Juno principal investigator and a physicist at Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, in a NASA statement. “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.”

Europa is slightly smaller than Earth’s Moon, but there is abundant evidence that a vast liquid ocean exists under its icy shell, which could have the right conditions for life. Jupiter’s immense gravitational forces tug and pull at the moon, a process that scientists think could heat the interior and possibly nurture marine ecosystems that might be similar to lifeforms that thrive around deep ocean hydrothermal vents here on Earth. 

Europa might also host aliens that are unrecognizable to us, or it could be inhospitable to life, but we won’t know until we can learn more about its surface and interior dynamics. To that end, Juno’s observations are expected to provide new insights about its surface, its icy shell, and its complex interactions with Jupiter. These details will be useful in the development of NASA’s dedicated mission to the moon, called the Europa Clipper, which is due for launch in 2024.

“The science team will be comparing the full set of images obtained by Juno with images from previous missions, looking to see if Europa’s surface features have changed over the past two decades,” said Candy Hansen, a Juno co-investigator at the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Arizona, in the statement. “The JunoCam images will fill in the current geologic map, replacing existing low-resolution coverage of the area.”