- Captain's Logs
- Feb 23, '22
- Sep 15, '17
- Sep 15, '15
- Jan 14, '15
- Dec 24, '14
- Jul 28, '14
- Jun 30, '14
- Nov 12, '13
- Jun 18, '13
- Dec 18, '12
- Jul 12, '12
- Apr 23, '12
- Nov 17, '11
- Jul 6, '11
- Nov 1, '10
- Sep 21, '09
- May 7, '09
- Apr 2, '09
- Mar 23, '09
- Dec 31, '08
- Nov 1, '08
- Jun 30, '08
- Mar 26, '08
- Dec 24, '07
- Oct 15, '07
- Mar 15, '07
- Dec 29, '06
- Sep 19, '06
- Jun 18, '06
- Mar 9, '06
- Dec 22, '05
- Jun 28, '05
- Jan 11, '05
- Dec 30, '04
- Nov 29, '04
- Oct 26, '04
- Sep 9, '04
- May 6, '04
- Feb 27, '04
- Dec 5, '03
- Nov 13, '03
- Nov 1, '02
- Mar 13, '02
- May 31, '01
- Oct 9, '00
- Feb 11, '00
- Sep 1, '99
 
|
 |
Europa's Broken Ice
PIA 00291
Image 968 x 452:
JPEG 99 KB
PNG 383 KB
|
|
Jupiter's moon Europa, as seen in this image taken June 27, 1996 by NASA's Galileo spacecraft, displays features in some areas resembling ice floes seen in Earth's polar seas. Europa, about the size of Earth's moon, has an icy crust that has been severely fractured, as indicated by the dark linear, curved, and wedged-shaped bands seen here. These fractures have broken the crust into plates as large as 30 kilometers (18.5 miles) across. Areas between the plates are filled with material that was probably icy slush contaminated with rocky debris. Some individual plates were separated and rotated into new positions. Europa's density indicates that it has a shell of water ice as thick as 100 kilometers (about 60 miles), parts of which could be liquid. Currently, water ice could extend from the surface down to the rocky interior, but the features seen in this image suggest that motion of the disrupted icy plates was lubricated by soft ice or liquid water below the surface at the time of disruption. This image covers part of the equatorial zone of Europa and was taken from a distance of 156,000 kilometers (about 96,300 miles) by the solid-state imager camera on the Galileo spacecraft. North is to the right and the sun is nearly directly overhead. The area shown is about 360 by 770 kilometers (220-by-475 miles or about the size of Nebraska), and the smallest visible feature is about 1.6 kilometers (1 mile) across. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory manages the Galileo mission for NASA's Office of Space Science.
Image Credit: NASA/JPL |
|
