May 5, 2020

Europa seen by the Galileo space probe

NASA has published reprocessed versions of three old photos of areas of the surface of Jupiter’s large moon Europa taken by the Galileo space probe on September 26, 1998. NASA scientists applied some processing techniques developed in recent years to the images obtaining new details of a series of geological features existing at the time on Europa’s frozen surface. This result offers is immediately useful for scientists interested in studying this moon and for the future because NASA is preparing the Europa Clipper mission, which also aims to try to understand what’s hidden in Europa’s underground ocean, with the hope to find life forms.