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Europa Close-Up

April 14, 2023
This view of Jupiter's moon Europa was captured in the 1990s by NASA's Galileo spacecraft. The smooth slopes and nearby rubble may have been produced by landslides.

This mosaic shows a portion of one of the highest-resolution images captured of Jupiter's moon Europa in the 1990s by NASA's Galileo spacecraft. This picture is cropped from a larger image. These are the kind of features studied by scientists who recently modeled how moonquakes may trigger landslides on icy moons circling Jupiter and Saturn.

Visible here are possible fault scarps (like those found on Earth when tectonic activity breaks the crust) with smooth slopes and nearby rubble that may have been produced by small landslides triggered by the faulting activity.

These images were obtained on Nov. 6, 1997, when Galileo was approximately 1,983 miles (3,250 kilometers) from Europa.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California managed the mission for the agency. JPL is a division of Caltech in Pasadena, California.

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