This diagram shows the innermost moons of Jupiter, including Adrastea, as well as Jupiter's system of rings.
Click on image for full size
Image courtesy of NASA/JPL.
Adrastea
Adrastea is a small moon of Jupiter. Of Jupiter's 60 moons, it is the second closest to the planet. Adrastea was discovered by David Jewitt and Ed Danielson of the Voyager team in 1979.
Adrastea is tiny and not quite round. It measures 13 x 10 x 8 km (8 x 6 x 5 miles). It orbits Jupiter at a distance of 128,971 km (about 80 thousand miles) from the planet's center.
Adrastea and another nearby moon, Metis, orbit within Jupiter's main ring. The Galileo spacecraft discovered that dust knocked from the surface of these two moons by asteroid impacts generates the material that makes up the main ring!
In Roman mythology, Adrastea was the daughter of Jupiter and Ananke and the distributor of rewards and punishments.
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