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Europa moon picture infographic
Picture shows two views of the trailing hemisphere of Jupiter’s ice-covered satellite, Europa.
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SPACE

Europa moon picture

September 21, 2003 - NASA is to crash its Galileo spacecraft into Jupiter on Sunday to ensure it cannot contaminate one of the planet's moons, Europa, with bacteria from Earth.

The left image shows the approximate natural colour appearance of Europa.

The image on the right is a false-colour composite version combining violet, green and infrared images to enhance colour differences in the predominantly water-ice crust of Europa. Dark brown areas represent rocky material derived from the interior, implanted by impact, or from a combination of interior and exterior sources. Bright plains in the polar areas (top and bottom) are shown in tones of blue to distinguish possibly coarse-grained ice (dark blue) from fine-grained ice (light blue). Long, dark lines are fractures in the crust, some of which are more than 3,000 kilometres (1,850 miles) long.

The bright feature containing a central dark spot in the lower third of the image is a young impact crater some 50 kilometres (31 miles) in diameter. This crater has been provisionally named ‘Pwyll’ for the Celtic god of the underworld.

Europa is about 3,160 kilometres (1,950 miles) in diameter, or about the size of Earth's moon. This image was taken on September 7, 1996, at a range of 677,000 kilometres (417,900 miles) by the solid state imaging television camera onboard the Galileo spacecraft during its second orbit around Jupiter. Must credit NASA

Sources
PUBLISHED: 16/9/2003; STORY: Graphic News; PICTURES: NASA
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