NASA’s spacecraft takes photo of Jupiter … from the moon

You know the feeling…. see Jupiter through your own telescope. If this gives you the chills – like it does to me – then you’ll know what the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter team felt when they turned around with their spaceship – yes, the orbiter who faithfully turns and gazes at the Moon. since 2008 – and have seen the giant planet Jupiter with their camera. If you zoom in on the image you can even see the Galilean moons of Jupiter.

Usually, LRO takes superb high resolution images of the lunar surface. But recently, the LRO team used powerful calculations and precise timing to use their Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LROC) camera to scan the area of ​​the sky where Jupiter would be, about 600 million miles away. They hit the jackpot. While not the quality of the Hubble Space Telescope, the fact that this image was taken from a spacecraft orbiting 100 km above the lunar surface is a true feat of engineering.

“We took a photo of Jupiter from the Moon last month,” LRO team member Brett Denevi said on Twitter. “It might not be the highest resolution ever, but it is ours.”

Denevi explained on the LRO website that the exercise to take a picture of Jupiter was a labor of love. The team does these complicated maneuvers because they love to explore planets and take pictures.

“It’s fun to peek around our solar system every now and then from our perch in the lunar orbit,” Denevi said.

To complicate matters, because the spacecraft is over 12 years old, some things don’t work the way they used to. The inertial measurement unit (IMU) – which keeps an eye on where LRO is pointed – is approaching the end of its operational lifespan. The IMU is now only used in emergencies or special situations. The LRO team must now use the spacecraft’s star tracking cameras to get an estimate of its location and rotation.

This “adds complications to imagery anywhere but directly on the lunar surface,” Denevi wrote, “(we don’t want star trackers to point to the moon rather than the stars!). space is also aging gracefully, so solar panels need to be kept away from the Sun for as little time as possible. And then adding other thermal and time constraints, the operations team had to work hard to find the right time to rotate the spacecraft to the outer solar system and travel through Jupiter to get this image.

Surprisingly, this is not the first time that LROC has taken a photo of Jupiter – they took another photo in 2020. And every once in a while LRO turns its gaze outward to take a look at it. other places in the solar system, like Mars and even Earth.

“But just like so many people around the world who love to turn their telescopes to the sky and see the stars and planets with their own eyes, the LROC team couldn’t resist doing the same,” Denevi said.