Europa: Natural and False Colour Views | PIA00502 | ||
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This image shows two views of the trailing hemisphere of Jupiter's ice-covered satellite, Europa. The upper image shows the approximate natural color appearance of Europa. The lower image is a false-colour composite version combining violet, green and infrared images to enhance colour differences in the predominantly water-ice crust of Europa. | ||
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Image Credit: JPL, DLR (German Aerospace Center) | |||
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This image shows two views of the trailing hemisphere of Jupiter's ice-covered satellite, Europa. The upper image shows the approximate natural colour appearance of Europa. The lower image is a false-colour composite version combining violet, green and infrared images to enhance colour differences in the predominantly water-ice crust of Europa. Dark brown areas represent rocky material derived from the interior, implanted by impact, or from a combination of interior and exterior sources. Bright plains in the polar areas (top and bottom) are shown in tones of blue to distinguish possibly coarse-grained ice (dark blue) from fine-grained ice (light blue). Long, dark lines are fractures in the crust, some of which are more than 3,000 kilometers (1,850 miles) long. The bright feature containing a central dark spot in the lower third of the image is a young impact crater some 50 kilometers (31 miles) in diameter. This crater has been provisionally named 'Pwyll' for the Celtic god of the underworld. | ![]() |
Europa
is about 3,160 km in diameter, or about the size of Earth's moon. This image
was taken on September 7, 1996, at a range of 677,000 km by the solid state
imaging television camera onboard the Galileo spacecraft during its second
orbit around Jupiter. The image was processed by Deutsche Forschungsanstalt
fuer Luft- und Raumfahrt e.V., Berlin, Germany. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA, manages the mission for NASA's Office of Space Science, Washington, DC. |
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