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A montage of Jupiter and its four largest moons (distance and sizes not to scale) There are 95 moons of Jupiter with confirmed orbits as of 5 February 2024. [1] [note 1] This number does not include a number of meter-sized moonlets thought to be shed from the inner moons, nor hundreds of possible kilometer-sized outer irregular moons that were only briefly captured by telescopes. [4]
Ganymede is the only Galilean moon of Jupiter named after a male figure—like Io, Europa, and Callisto, he was a lover of Zeus. In English, the Galilean satellites Io, Europa and Callisto have the Latin spellings of their names, but the Latin form of Ganymede is Ganymēdēs , which would be pronounced / ˌ ɡ æ n ɪ ˈ m iː d iː z / . [ 38 ]
The Galilean moons are named after Galileo Galilei, who observed them in either December 1609 or January 1610, and recognized them as satellites of Jupiter in March 1610; [2] they remained the only known moons of Jupiter until the discovery of the fifth largest moon of Jupiter Amalthea in 1892. [3]
Flybys of Jupiter’s fiery moon Io, carried out by NASA’s Juno spacecraft, are helping to solve the enduring mystery of why the small moon is the most volcanically active body in our solar system.
Europa / j ʊ ˈ r oʊ p ə / ⓘ, or Jupiter II, is the smallest of the four Galilean moons orbiting Jupiter, and the sixth-closest to the planet of all the 95 known moons of Jupiter. It is also the sixth-largest moon in the Solar System .
The mission is designed to orbit Jupiter and fly past Europa 49 times, each time soaring over a different area to eventually cover almost the entire moon, pole to pole. The spacecraft will get as ...
The Europa Clipper spacecraft lifted off at 12:06 p.m. ET, and will travel 1.8 billion miles over more than five years to reach Jupiter. For decades, an icy moon of Jupiter has been considered one ...
Jupiter's moons were classified into four groups of four, based on their similar orbital elements. [204] This picture has been complicated by the discovery of numerous small outer moons since 1999. Jupiter's moons are divided into several different groups, although there are two known moons which are not part of any group (Themisto and Valetudo ...