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Scientists have achieved their best appearance to date in three chaotic patches on Jupiter’s moon Europa’s icy surface thanks to decade-long images of a long-gone spacecraft.
From nasa Galileo spacecraft He spent eight years touring the Jupiter system, between 1995 and 2003, and during that time made 11 flybys of the frozen moon Europa. On September 26, 1998, during one such maneuver, Galileo captured particularly detailed black-and-white images of the moon’s cracked surface. Now, scientists have reviewed those images to prepare for future missions to the intriguing world.
“We have only seen a very small part of Europe’s surface at this resolution,” said Cynthia Phillips, a planetary geologist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California and a staff scientist for the Europe project working on future missions, he said in a statement. “Europa Clipper will greatly increase that.”
Related: Europa, mysterious frozen moon of Jupiter in photos
Europa Clipper is a new NASA mission whose objective is to launch in in 2023 or 2025 and make 45 passes over the moon. During that time, he will study Europa’s thin atmosphere, icy surface, hypothetical subsurface ocean, and internal magnetic field, giving scientists their first glimpse of the moon since the Galileo mission.
To prepare for the new mission, scientists are trying to extract as much information as they can from Galileo’s data, and that’s where the reprocessed images come in. During the 1998 flyby, Galileo was able to capture images showing surface characteristics just 1,500 feet (460 meters) wide.
Such detail is important because it turns out that there is many things on the surface of Europe. First, it is strangely young, between 40 and 90 million years old, one of the coolest surfaces in the entire solar system. (The moon, like Earth and the rest of the solar system, is about 4.6 billion years old.)
Europe’s ice is also very active: it is crisscrossed with wide, flat bands where ice has formed between spreading blocks, ridges hundreds of feet high where ice repeatedly hits and splits, and patches so messy that scientists call its structure “chaos terrain“In these areas, scientists believe that the ice blocks have migrated, appeared and twisted, and then have been trapped again in the ice that freezes around them.
That’s ingenious, but Galileo’s images are grayscale shots of the moon’s surface. And for Europe, color photography can provide scientists with another important detail about icy history, particularly when image-processing experts emphasize small visible differences in color. Those differences reflect the chemical composition: the white or blue areas have higher levels of pure water ice, while the redder areas contain other compounds, such as you go out, which potentially originated in the hypothetical global ocean of the moon.
The new images start with Galileo’s high-resolution black-and-white images and add color from lower-resolution images, offering scientists the best of both worlds.
Email Meghan Bartels at [email protected] or follow her @meghanbartels. Follow us On twitter @Spacedotcom and in Facebook.
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