Ganymede's Shadow
Date: 9 Jan 2007

The New Horizons Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) took this photo of Jupiter at 20:42:01 UTC on 9 January 2007, when the spacecraft was 80 million km (49.6 million miles) from the giant planet. The volcanic moon Io is to the left of the planet; the shadow of the icy moon Ganymede moves across Jupiter's northern hemisphere.


Ganymede's average orbit distance from Jupiter is about one million kilometers (620,000 miles); Io's is 422,000 km (262,000 miles). Both Io and Ganymede are larger than Earth's moon; Ganymede is larger than the planet Mercury.


Last Update: 7 Dec 2011 (AMB)

Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute