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Fine Details of the Icy Surface of Ganymede

Sept. 7, 1997
Dramatic view of fine details in ice hills and valleys in an unnamed region on Jupiter's moon Ganymede. This image was taken on June 28, 1996, by NASA's Galileo spacecraft.

Dramatic view of fine details in ice hills and valleys in an unnamed region on Jupiter's moon Ganymede. North is to the top of the picture and the sun illuminates the surface from the left. The finest details that can be discerned in this picture are only 11 meters across (similar to the size of an average house) some 2000 times better than previous images of this region. The bright areas in the left hand version are the sides of hills facing the sun; the dark areas are shadows. In the right hand version the processing has been changed to bring out details in the shadowed regions that are illuminated by the bright hillsides. The brightness of some of the hillsides is so high that the picture elements "spill over" down the columns of the picture. The image was taken on June 28, 1996 from a distance of about 1000 kilometers. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA manages the mission for NASA's Office of Space Science, Washington, DC. This image and other images and data received from Galileo are posted on the World Wide Web, on the Galileo mission home page at URL http://galileo.jpl.nasa.gov. Background information and educational context for the images can be found at http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/galileo/sepo.

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