Galileo's First Image of Amalthea
Galileo's first view of Amalthea, a small inner moon of Jupiter, showing the end of the elongated satellite that faces permanently toward the giant planet. North is to the top of the picture and the Sun illuminates the surface from the left. The circular feature that dominates the upper-right portion of the disk is Pan, the largest crater on Amalthea. This crater is about 90 kilometers wide. The bright spot at the south pole is associated with another, slightly smaller crater named Gaea. The Universal Time is 8 hours, 18 minutes, 0 seconds on the 7th of September, 1996.
The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA manages the Galileo mission for NASA's Office of Space Science, Washington, DC. JPL is an operating division of California Institute of Technology (Caltech).
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.