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An approximately natural color (left) and a false-color (on the right) image of Europa. The photograph on the right highlights the water-ice crust of Europa - the moon of Jupiter.
The dark brown material comes from inside the Europa itself.
The dark blue ice at the poles are possibly larger grained ice than the finer grained ice (shown in a lighter blue).
The long, nearly straight, dark lines are fractures in Europa's crust. (Fractures are cracks or breaks.)
The large bright area in the bottom right-hand side of Europa is a relatively recent impact crater, called Pwyll, about 50 kilometers across.
A false color photograph of Europa, the icy moon of Jupiter. The false color helps to bring out details that are otherwise not easy to see. Photograph by NASA's Galileo spacecraft.
The different shades of red and brown indicate the presence of contaminants/dust/rocks in the ice.
The different shades of blue probably indicate the different grain sizes in the ice.
The smallest features visible is about 2 kilometers across.
'Large' image: size 56 KB
Picture of crater Pwyll on Europa by the Galileo spacecraft. This impact basin/crater is about 140 kilometers across. It looks like the bulls-eyes on a cars windscreen when it is hit by small pebbles/rocks.
Picture of Europa, Jupiter's icy moon, by NASA's Galileo spacecraft.
There are several impact craters on the left-hand side of this picture - from 30 meters to over 450 meters in diameter.
These craters are all in a bright ray coming from the large impact crater Pwyll on Europa. This might mean that all these craters where formed at the time of impact when the crater Pwyll was created. The crater Pwyll is over 1000 kilometers from this area, so the impact was quite large. (The previous picture shows the size of the area around Pwyll that were affected.)
