The moon of Jupiter Europe has a very varied landscape, including mountain ranges, stripes, small rounded domes and eroded surface, which geologists call the “chaos”. Three newly processed image made by spacecraft NASA Galileo (18.10.1989 – 21.09.2003) in the late 1990-ies, revealing details of a variety of surface features on Europa.
Although the data obtained Galileo has more than two decades, scientists are using modern image processing techniques to create new maps of the surface. All this is in preparation for the flight of a new spacecraft Clipper. The Orbiter will spend a lot of time over Europe, to learn more about the oceans beneath the thick icy crust of the moon and how it interacts with the surface. The mission, which should begin in the next few years, will be the first return to Europe since the time of Galileo.
“We saw only a very small part of the surface of Europe in this high resolution. Camera Clipper will increase the number of shots several times,” said planetary geologist Cynthia Phillips of the jet propulsion Laboratory of NASA in Pasadena.
As a researcher, she directs a long term research project on re-analysis of images of the moon.
All images were obtained at the same latitude of Europe, where flying Galileo 26 September 1998, eight of the 11 scheduled turns of the spacecraft over Europe. Image with high resolution, showing objects the size of just 460 meters in diameter, were taken through the clear filter grayscale (black and white). Using the colored low-resolution images of the same region from another flight, technicians recreated the colors in the image with higher resolution is a painstaking process.
Similar image with improved colors allow scientists to distinguish objects with different colors. These images show Europe is not as it seems to the human eye, and exaggerate color variations, highlighting different chemical compositions of the surface. Areas that appear blue or white contain relatively pure water ice, while reddish areas are more not icy materials such as salt.
Scientists, planetary scientists examine image of Europe with high resolution to understand how the surface has formed. The average age of the surface that we see today, from 40 to 90 million years, much younger than most of Europe, which was formed together with the solar system 4.6 billion years ago. In fact Europe has one of the youngest surfaces in the Solar system, which is one of her oddities.
It is believed that the long, linear g��ebni and stripes that cross the surface of Europa, connected with the reaction surface of the ice crust of Europe, when it is stretched and pulled by the strong gravity of Jupiter. The ridges can be formed when the fracture surface is repeatedly opened and closed, creating objects with a height of several hundred meters, several kilometers in width and extend in length to thousands of kilometers.
The so-called territory of chaos contain blocks that are moved laterally, rotated, or bent before re-freezing on their new places. To understand how they may have formed, scientists are studying these blocks as though they represent a mixed puzzle pieces.
