PIA01615: Swaths of Grooved Terrain on Ganymede
 Target Name:  Ganymede
 Is a satellite of:  Jupiter
 Mission:  Galileo
 Spacecraft:  Galileo Orbiter
 Instrument:  Solid-State Imaging 
 Product Size:  949 x 559 pixels (w x h)
 Produced By:  Brown University
 Producer ID:  P50037 MRPS89765
 Addition Date:  1998-07-15
 Primary Data Set:  Galileo EDRs
 Full-Res TIFF:  PIA01615.tif (499.9 kB)
 Full-Res JPEG:  PIA01615.jpg (160.6 kB)

Click on the image above to download a moderately sized image in JPEG format (possibly reduced in size from original)

Original Caption Released with Image:

A swath of grooved terrain named Erech Sulcus cuts north-south across the ancient dark terrain of Marius Regio. The multiple scales of ubiquitous grooves in Erech Sulcus probably formed when tectonic forces pulled apart the icy surface of Jupiter's moon, Ganymede. Similar sets of faults occur in rift zones on Earth, as in eastern Africa. The southern edge of Erech Sulcus is truncated by the smoother bright terrain of Sippar Sulcus, trending roughly east-west. The relatively smooth appearance of Sippar Sulcus hints that icy volcanism once paved over the area.

North is to the top of the picture and the sun illuminates the surface from the right. The mosaic, centered at 16 degrees south latitude and 177 degrees longitude, covers an area approximately 950 by 560 kilometers. The resolution is 143 meters per picture element. The images were taken on May 7, 1997 at 15 hours, 24 minutes, 39 seconds Universal Time at a range of 14,263 kilometers by the Solid State Imaging (SSI) system on NASA's Galileo spacecraft.

The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA manages the Galileo mission for NASA's Office of Space Science, Washington, DC.

This image and other images and data received from Galileo are posted on the World Wide Web, on the Galileo mission home page at URL http://solarsystem.nasa.gov/galileo/. Background information and educational context for the images can be found at http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/galileo/sepo.

Image Credit:
NASA/JPL/Brown University

Image Addition Date:
1998-07-15