Europa: Natural and False Colour Views PIA00502
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)  

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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