English: Uploader's notes: The NASA-published closeup images have been converted from TIFF to JPEG format, the globe/location key has been cropped and enlarged, and the images combined by the uploader.

Synopsis of original captions released with images:
The surface of Jupiter's moon Europa features a widely varied landscape, including ridges, bands, small rounded domes and disrupted spaces that geologists called "chaos terrain." These newly reprocessed images were taken by NASA's Galileo spacecraft on Sept. 26, 1998, and reveal details of diverse surface features on Europa.

All three images were captured along the same longitude of Europa as Galileo flew by on Sept. 26, 1998, in the spacecraft's 17th orbit of Jupiter (orbit E17). It was the eighth of Galileo's 11 targeted flybys of Europa. High-resolution images were taken through a clear filter in grayscale (black and white). Using lower-resolution, color images of the same region from a different flyby (orbit E14), technicians recently mapped color onto the higher-resolution images. (Orbit E14 resulted in this global view of Europa [see PIA19048]. The color information gathered on that flyby was used to reprocess these new images.)

Enhanced-color images like these allow scientists to highlight geologic features with different colors, which are related to chemical compositions of the surface. Areas that appear light blue or white are made up of relatively pure water ice, and reddish areas have more non-ice materials.

The upper left image [PIA23871] shows a transitional location between blocky chaos terrain, on the left, and ridged plains on the right. A few chaos blocks are visible on the left as individually broken and rotated pieces of preexisting surface material; their shadows indicate that some of these blocks have tilted as well. A ridge passes through the center of this image. These ridges, which contain arc-shaped segments joined together by a series of cusps, may be related to how the icy surface crust of Europa fractures when subjected to stresses from Jupiter's strong gravity. The right side of this image shows a few lenticulae, which are small rounded surface features, commonly domed in appearance. The image resolution is 247 yards (226 meters) per pixel, and this image depicts an area about 180 miles (300 kilometers) across, centered approximately at 6.4 degrees north latitude, and 135.3 degrees east positive longitude. The image was produced by Mario Valenti at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif.

The upper right image [PIA23872; this overlaps substantially with PIA20028] shows a region of Europa's surface covered with ridges and bands, with a few small disrupted chaos regions. The long, linear ridges and bands that crisscross Europa's surface are thought to be related to the response of Europa's icy surface crust as it is stretched and pulled by Jupiter's strong gravity. Ridges, a common surface feature type, may form when a crack in the surface opens and closes repeatedly, building up a feature that's typically a few hundred yards tall, a few miles wide and that can stretch horizontally for thousands of miles. In contrast, bands are locations where a crack appears to have continued pulling apart horizontally, producing large, wide, relatively flat features. This image shows both ridges and bands, which interact with each other in complex ways that are somewhat similar to tectonic activity on the Earth. The image resolution is 244 yards (223 meters) per pixel, and this image depicts an area about 180 miles (285 kilometers) across, centered approximately at -10.5 degrees south latitude, and 135.0 degrees east positive longitude. This image was produced by Mario Valenti at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif.

The lower right image [PIA23873] shows a region of blocky chaos terrain, where the surface has broken apart into many smaller chaos blocks that are surrounded by featureless matrix material. Many of the chaos blocks have moved sideways, rotated, or tilted before being refrozen into their new locations, and some larger blocks preserve features of the pre-existing terrain before it was broken up. Using these features as clues, scientists have been able to reconstruct some chaos regions like jjgsaw puzzles to track the motion of blocks. Cutting through the chaos terrain near the bottom, from left to right, is a broad flat band. Called Agenor Linea, it is one of the longest bands on Europa and is distinctive for its two-color appearance, with a bright region at the top and a darker region below. Another rare bright band, Katreus Linea, cuts across the top portion of this image. The image resolution is 243 yards (222 meters) per pixel, and this image depicts an area about 170 miles (280 kilometers) across, centered approximately at -40.7 degrees south latitude, and 142.4 degrees east positive longitude. This image was produced by Mario Valenti at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif.

The figure at lower left indicates the locations on Europa depicted in the newly processed images, with locations from north to south corresponding to the images proceeding clockwise from upper left.

The Galileo mission was managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of Caltech in Pasadena, California, for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. Additional information about Galileo and its discoveries is available on the Galileo mission home page at http://solarsystem.nasa.gov/galileo/.

More information about Europa and Europa Clipper is available at europa.nasa.gov.