NASA introduced an updated image of Europe, the satellite of Jupiter

This is how the updated image of Europe (NASA, full-size version ) looks like.

Europe is the satellite of Jupiter, the planet-gas giant. Europe has long attracted the attention of scientists and science fiction writers, in particular because the surface of the satellite is covered with a multilometer-thick water ice. Most likely, scientists say, under the ice - the ocean, and it can be warm for various reasons.

Well, the liquid water existing on the satellite for many millions of years is a potentially habitable environment. What is hidden there, under the thickness of ice, no one knows, but many are eager to find out. Now experts are creating projects of missions to Europe, missions that could give us more information about this object. But while there is no new information about Europe, including images, one has to be content with what is.

And the other day NASA introduced a new version of the famous image of Europe, from photographs taken by Galileo back in the 95th and 98th years of the last century. But they made up a single whole from these photos using modern image processing methods.

The original image was made up of individual photographs with a lower resolution and a strongly changed color gamut (you can seehere ).


This is how the first version of the image presented in 2001

looked like. The new image looks like the surface of Europe would look if a person were looking at it, i.e. color rendering - realistic.

The results of processing photos are impressive - now you can see how heterogeneous the surface of Europe is, how many radial cracks and splits on its surface. Images are obtained using near infrared, green, and violet filters. Then the colors were adjusted, taking into account the real wavelengths. The “white spots” in the photograph were filled by fitting the intended appearance of these spaces, when comparing with neighboring areas.