A new newly-reprocessed NASA image revealed stunning details of Jupiter's large frozen moon Europa in full color.
The image was taken by NASA's Galileo spacecraft in the late 1990s, it shows the largest surface of the moon's surface at the highest resolution, NASA reported.
In the past the view was released as a lower-resolution mosaic with highly enhanced color; to create this new version, researchers assembled the images to create a realistically-colored view of the moon's surface that is extremely close to what would be seen with the naked human eye if viewed from this proximity.
"The scene shows the stunning diversity of Europa's surface geology. Long, linear cracks and ridges crisscross the surface, interrupted by regions of disrupted terrain where the surface ice crust has been broken up and re-frozen into new patterns," NASA stated.
The color variations demonstrate different geological features types and locations.The blue and white areas are believed to be composed of pure water ice while the reddish regions included non-ice components; the polar regions are shown at the left and right of the image.
The images were taken through a combination of near-infrared, green and violet filters which were later corrected for light scattered outside of the visible image, producing a wavelength-calibrated color. The team also filled in gaps in the image with simulated colors based on the surrounding terrain.
The mosaic images were acquired by the e Galileo Solid-State Imaging (SSI) experiment on during the spacecraft's first and fourteenth orbits by Jupiter; this took place back in 1995 and 1998.
"The Galileo mission was managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, for the agency's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. JPL is a division of the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena," NASA stated.
