Dreaming about Ganymede

In order to help with the detailed planning of ESA’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer mission, Juice, and in particular the study of Jupiter’s largest moon Ganymede, the spacecraft’s JANUS camera team at the German Aerospace Center DLR has created a new global mosaic of the moon based on data collected by NASA’s Voyager and Galileo missions. Voyager 1 and 2 flew by Ganymede in the late 1970s, while Galileo imaged the moon in the 1990s as part of its tour of the Jovian system. The mosaic presented in this video comprises 118 Voyager images and 88 Galileo images, resulting in a one billion pixel map (46080 by 23040 pixels) with a spatial resolution up to 359 m/pixel. Ganymede is the largest moon in the Solar System – even larger than planet Mercury – with a thick crust of ice on top of a global water ocean, and evidence for wide-spread resurfaced regions indicating periods of geological activity. One of the main science goals of Juice is to study Ganymede and its neighbour ocean-bearing moons Callisto a