Chilling Infrared Image Of Mars Captured By NASA's Europa Clipper, Next Stop Jupiter
The spacecraft did not use the cameras in its prominent Europa Imaging System (EIS) to capture this image; rather, it used its infrared camera, Europa Thermal Emission Imaging System (E-THEMIS). The result was "a thousand grayscale pictures" in shades of white and black. While you may likely not be fascinated by neutral-colored photos, scientists have enhanced them to make them visually appealing. They added suitable colors to it as shown below.
The 1000 snapshots were taken within just 18 minutes. However, these snapshots took over 60 days to get to Earth. The distance and size of the data involved would have contributed to the transmission delay. The images were captured to help test its E-THEMIS, which will explore geologic activities on the Europa surface in the next five years. Scientists could not fully test Clipper's radar instrument before it departed from Earth on October 14, 2024. Therefore, the Mars flyby presented an opportunity for them to do just that.
Since NASA reported over a thousand snapshots, why are we simply referring to an image? This is because several photos were combined to form "a global snapshot of Mars"; despite this, the picture was still blurry. The blurry nature of the image results from the infrared light, which is known to produce low-resolution images.
The fact that the image was taken during a flyby of Mars is no mere coincidence. NASA scientists carefully planned that it would move close to Mars to enable it to get a gravity assist, which was intended to adjust its speed and fine-tune its orbit around the sun. This maneuver ultimately realigned its part and positioned it in a more efficient partway to its ultimate destination, Europa.
