Europa in true color
The photo to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, was taken on September 29, 2022 by the Jupiter orbiter Juno during its close fly-by of Europa. Citizen scientist Bjorn Jonsson has processed it to bring out the details. From his caption:
This is an approximately true color/contrast, reprocessed version of Europa image PJ45_1. It is more carefully processed than the version I posted very shortly after the raw image data was released. The color should be fairly close to Europa’s real color and probably slightly more accurate than the color of the earlier version I posted. North is up.
The Sun is coming from the right, so those are craters in the upper left, close to the shadowed limb of the planet. The red color has been known for decades, and appears in many cases to be seepage coming up from the many meandering ridges that criss-cross the planet’s surface. Their chemistry/make-up is not fully known at this time.
Juno came within 219 miles of Europa, the closest any spacecraft has come since the Galileo orbiter circled Jupiter in the 1990s. I was expecting close-up images of the surface, from that close distance, but have not yet seen any. Instead, most of the images released and processed by citizen scientists have been global images from farther away. Thus, at this moment it does not appear Juno took pictures at this closest distance.
The photo to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, was taken on September 29, 2022 by the Jupiter orbiter Juno during its close fly-by of Europa. Citizen scientist Bjorn Jonsson has processed it to bring out the details. From his caption:
This is an approximately true color/contrast, reprocessed version of Europa image PJ45_1. It is more carefully processed than the version I posted very shortly after the raw image data was released. The color should be fairly close to Europa’s real color and probably slightly more accurate than the color of the earlier version I posted. North is up.
The Sun is coming from the right, so those are craters in the upper left, close to the shadowed limb of the planet. The red color has been known for decades, and appears in many cases to be seepage coming up from the many meandering ridges that criss-cross the planet’s surface. Their chemistry/make-up is not fully known at this time.
Juno came within 219 miles of Europa, the closest any spacecraft has come since the Galileo orbiter circled Jupiter in the 1990s. I was expecting close-up images of the surface, from that close distance, but have not yet seen any. Instead, most of the images released and processed by citizen scientists have been global images from farther away. Thus, at this moment it does not appear Juno took pictures at this closest distance.