Jupiter remains one of the gems of our Solar System, and for good reasons. We’re talking about the biggest planet out there, one where it’s even impossible to lay foot. Besides having a much stronger gravity compared to Earth, Jupiter is also made mostly of gases. An astronaut trying to walk on the planet’s surface would simply sink into oblivion.
But while Jupiter is so weird, it’s almost clear that no life as we know it could survive there. But that doesn’t mean that some life forms cannot exist on any of Jupiter’s moons. And there are many of those moons! According to the latest findings, the gas giant has somewhere between 80 and 95 moons.
Who knows what astronauts could find on Jupiter’s moons, such as Ganymede, Io, Callisto, Europa, and so on? Luckily, the upcoming JUICE mission of the European Space Agency (ESA) will shed some light!
You can watch the launch of JUICE live!
If you head over to the ESA’s live streaming site, you can watch the launch of the JUICE spacecraft towards the moons of Jupiter in real-time.
The launch will take place on Friday at 8:14 am ET aboard an Ariane 5 rocket from the Spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana.
We could surely be jealous of Jupiter for having so many moons compared to our planet! While the Earth has only one natural satellite, Saturn is another planet in the Solar System that’s teeming with moons. In fact, Saturn might actually be the planet that has the most moons in our Solar System: 80 have been discovered by astronomers so far.
The biggest moon of Jupiter, on the other hand, is Ganymede. This natural satellite of the gas giant is so big that even planet Mercury is smaller than it. You got that right: the first planet from the Sun is smaller than one of Jupiter’s moons!
