Juno Post-Arrival News Conference

Early risers will already be aware that there’s currently a lot of planetary activity in the morning sky, but at dawn in Western Europe on Monday, 2 April, Mars and Saturn will be just 1¼ degrees apart and seen in the same field of view of telescopes at 30x magnification. The waning Moon is close by on the mornings of 7 & 8 April too.

As it orbits Jupiter, the icy surface of Europa heaves and falls with the changing pull of its parent planet’s gravity, creating enough heat to likely support a global ocean beneath the Jovian moon’s solid shell. Experiments by geoscientists suggest that this process, called tidal dissipation, could create far more heat in Europa’s ice than scientists had previously assumed.

Researchers have paired the continent-wide Very Large Baseline Array radio telescope system with NASA’s Cassini spacecraft to determine the position of Saturn and its moons to within two miles — at a range of nearly a billion miles.