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NASA reprocessed Galileo’s images of Europe and came up with this beauty.
NASA / JPL-Caltech / SETI Institute
Jupiter’s funky moon Europa represents one of our best shots to find signs of life beyond Earth in our solar system. NASA will send a future mission to study frozen Europe, but in the meantime we may get lost in some new versions of old images taken by the Galileo spacecraft in 1998.
One of several recently reprocessed images showing Galileo’s view of Jupiter’s moon Europa. This is from an area called Crisscrossing Bands.
NASA / JPL-Caltech / SETI Institute
On Thursday, NASA released three recently reworked Galileo views highlighting the moon’s “terrain of chaos,” which looks like a cross between ice crystals and frantic scratch marks.
The space agency revisited the older images in preparation to send the Europa Clipper mission for a visit. Clipper is expected to launch as early as 2023.
These images are not exactly what we would see if we visited Europe in person. NASA processed the images to improve color and highlight landscape features. “The areas that appear light blue or white are made of relatively pure water ice, and the reddish areas have more non-ice materials, such as salts,” the agency said.
Scientists are curious about how the relatively young surface of Europe was formed. “The so-called chaos terrain areas contain blocks that have been moved sideways, rotated, or tilted before refreezing in their new locations,” NASA said.
The Galileo mission ended in 2003 when the spacecraft dove into Jupiter’s atmosphere. Europa Clipper will continue where Galileo left off. It will also look for signs that Europe could possibly host some form of life. There may be more than chaos lurking in the strange terrain of the moon.
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