Sputnik reported on a December 2022 scientific paper published online by Nature Astronomy on Oct. 30, 2023, in which a team of scientists who had been re-examining data from the June 2021 flyby of the Juno spacecraft past Jupiter’s moon Ganymede discovered that there were several chemicals necessary for life which could be detected in Ganymede’s atmosphere.
Sputnik noted that the data which revealed the compounds was gathered by Juno’s Jovian InfraRed Auroral Mapper (JIRAM) spectrometer, a device used to study the chemistry of atmospheres. The JIRAM detected salts “such as hydrated sodium chloride, ammonium chloride, sodium bicarbonate, and possibly organic compounds called aliphatic aldehydes, which the National Institutes of Health describes as “essential building blocks for the synthesis of more complex organic compounds.”
“‘We found the greatest abundance of salts and organics in the dark and bright terrains at latitudes protected by the magnetic field,’ said Scott Bolton of the Southwest Research Institute, who is Juno’s principal investigator and one of the paper’s co-authors. ‘This suggests we are seeing the remnants of a deep ocean brine that reached the surface of this frozen world.’
“Today, Ganymede’s vast ocean can only be found beneath its ice surface, as the huge moon has almost no atmosphere. However, water still spews up into the skies over Ganymede through huge geysers, which Juno also observed during the 2021 flyby.
