Europa triple bands - Galileo images (original) (raw)

The Europa Scene in the Voyager-Galileo Era

2004

Current Galileo Mission data are giving us the closest views of Jupiter's icy moon, Europa, since Voyager images first revealed the surface 20 years ago. The icy crust is smooth and blocky, with a banded and broken-puzzle appearance. Europa's outer shell, intriguing to geologists and astrobiologists alike, has been cited as evidence supporting a subsurface-ocean hypothesis. Two articles in a recent Galileo Mission special section of the Journal of Geophysical Research (Planets) review the water-ice surface, major geologic units, and the search for current geologic activity on Europa. Ronald Greeley (Arizona State University) and colleagues from universities, NASA, U. S. Geological Survey, and the National Optical Astronomy Observatories provide an extensive compilation of Europa's primary geologic units as a framework for further mapping of the surface. In another analysis of Galileo images, Cynthia Phillips of the University of Arizona (now at the SETI Institute) and co...

New horizons mapping of Europa and Ganymede

Science (New York, N.Y.), 2007

The New Horizons spacecraft observed Jupiter's icy satellites Europa and Ganymede during its flyby in February and March 2007 at visible and infrared wavelengths. Infrared spectral images map H2O ice absorption and hydrated contaminants, bolstering the case for an exogenous source of Europa's "non-ice" surface material and filling large gaps in compositional maps of Ganymede's Jupiter-facing hemisphere. Visual wavelength images of Europa extend knowledge of its global pattern of arcuate troughs and show that its surface scatters light more isotropically than other icy satellites.