The most detailed images ever taken of two of Europa and Ganymede, two future destinations for exciting new missions to the Jovian system, have been unveiled by planetary scientists from the University of Leicester’s School of Physics and Astronomy.
Europa is named for a woman who, in Greek mythology, was abducted by the god Zeus – Jupiter in Roman mythology. It may be the most promising place in our solar system to find present-day environments suitable for some form of life beyond Earth. With an equatorial diameter of 1,940 miles, Europa is about 90 percent the size of Earth’s Moon. It orbits Jupiter every 3.5 days.
As some of the sharpest images of Jupiter’s moons ever acquired from a ground-based observatory, they reveal new insights into the processes shaping the chemical composition of these massive moons – including geological features such as the long rift-like linae cutting across Europa’s surface.
Ganymede and Europa are two of the four largest moons orbiting Jupiter, a quartet known as the Galilean satellites. While Europa is quite similar in size to our own Moon, Ganymede is the largest moon in the entire Solar System.
The Leicester team, led by PhD student Oliver King, used the European Southern Observatory’s
The new observations recorded the amount of sunlight reflected from Europa and Ganymede’s surfaces at different infrared wavelengths, producing a reflectance spectrum. These reflectance spectra are analyzed by developing a computer model that compares each observed spectrum to spectra of different substances that have been measured in laboratories.
The images and spectra of Europa, published in the Planetary Science Journal, reveal that Europa’s crust is mainly composed of frozen water ice with non-ice materials contaminating the surface.
Oliver King from the University of Leicester School of Physics and Astronomy said: “We mapped the distributions of the different materials on the surface, including sulphuric
“The modeling found that there could be a variety of different salts present on the surface, but suggested that infrared spectroscopy alone is generally unable to identify which specific types of salt are present.”
Ganymede is not only Jupiter’s largest moon, but the largest moon in our solar system. In fact, it is bigger than the planet Mercury and the dwarf planet Sharpest Earth-Based Images of Jupiter’s Moons Europa and Ganymede Reveal Their