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PIA25498: Europa Close-Up
This view of Jupiter's moon Europa was captured in the 1990s by NASA's Galileo spacecraft. The smooth slopes and nearby rubble may have been produced by landslides.
 Target Name:  Europa
 Is a satellite of:  Jupiter
 Mission:  Galileo 
 Spacecraft:  Galileo Orbiter
 Instrument:  Solid-State Imaging 
 Product Size:  400 x 400 pixels (w x h) 
 Produced By:  JPL 
 Primary Data Set:  Galileo EDRs 
 Full-Res TIFF:  PIA25498.tif (160.4 kB)
 Full-Res JPEG:  PIA25498.jpg (40.6 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:

This mosaic shows a portion of one of the highest-resolution images captured of Jupiter's moon Europa in the 1990s by NASA's Galileo spacecraft. This picture is cropped from a larger image. These are the kind of features studied by scientists who recently modeled how moonquakes may trigger landslides on icy moons circling Jupiter and Saturn.

Visible here are possible fault scarps (like those found on Earth when tectonic activity breaks the crust) with smooth slopes and nearby rubble that may have been produced by small landslides triggered by the faulting activity.

These images were obtained on Nov. 6, 1997, when Galileo was approximately 1,983 miles (3,250 kilometers) from Europa.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California managed the mission for the agency. JPL is a division of Caltech in Pasadena, California.

Image Credit:
NASA/JPL-Caltech

Image Addition Date:
2023-04-14