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The idea of life on Jupiter’s icy moon Europa has fascinated scientists for decades, but it was in the 1990s, with sharp images from NASA’s Galileo spacecraft, that researchers took it one step further. to believe in its possibility. NASA has now remastered some of Galileo’s impressive images of Europe, using new improved calibrations to introduce colors, in an attempt to get a closer look at the Jovian satellite.
In the splendid images shared on Instagram, the long and winding lines of Europe shed new light on its varied landscape. As explained by NASA, the image shows a region where ice blocks have been moved sideways, rotated, or tilted before refreezing in their new locations and to understand how it might have happened, scientists study these blocks of ice like puzzle pieces. While geologists have called them “Chaos Ground”, the remastered images are simply fascinating.
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Take a look here:
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Ocean in Europe
The long curved lines in the remastered images hint at the liquid surface water. While posting these images on the NASA website, the scientists clarified that the tidal motion experienced by Europe in its elliptical orbit around Jupiter supplies the energy to keep the ocean in a liquid state under a 15 to 25 ice cap. kilometres. The cosmic ocean is estimated to be 60 to 150 kilometers deep. Thus, while the Jovian satellite is only a quarter of the diameter of Earth, Europe’s ocean is estimated to contain twice as much water as our planet.
The latest observations from the Hubble Telescope, and new analysis of Galileo’s ancient data, have suggested that Europe’s ocean may be leaking in space. In fact, in November 2019, an international team of scientists announced the detection of water vapors for the first time on the surface of Europe. The observation was made using a spectrograph at NASA’s Hawaii observatory, as it measured the chemical composition of Europe’s atmosphere by comparing the emission and absorption of infrared light.
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