It was on February 28, 2007, that NASA's
New Horizons spacecraft used Jupiter as a gravity assist on its way to the dwarf planet Pluto—which New Horizons visited on
July 14, 2015. This amazing composite image of Jupiter
(captured in the infrared on February 28, 2007) and its volcanic moon Io
(photographed in visible light on March 1, 2007) was taken by the robotic probe before it spent the next eight years venturing out to Pluto and then the Kuiper Belt region.
It remains to be seen if NASA's
James Webb Space Telescope will be able to scope out another Kuiper Belt Object
(after Arrokoth, which New Horizons flew past on January 1, 2019) for New Horizons to explore over the coming years...
Happy end of February!
NASA / Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory / Southwest Research Institute / Goddard Space Flight Center
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