Like George Lucas reissued his Star Wars trilogy in a digital update for a new audience, NASA re-released the updated image on one of its space classics.
Since it was published in 2001, when the famous Galileo spacecraft has watched the cracks of the frozen satellite of Jupiter in Europe, the photograph has graced countless book covers and aroused the imagination in the world about what lies inside this small world under its surface ocean.
But the original image, which in reality is a mosaic of individual photographs taken by a NASA spacecraft in the late 1990s, was subjected to enhanced color of the surface details, otherwise it could not be perceived properly. Now, using modern image processing techniques, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, has recreated the alien landscape as the human eye would see it.
In the images below you can see the processed version with its original image made by the Galileo spacecraft.
Processed image. Click on the photo to enlarge
"Fans of satellite imagery presented their own versions of the image, made on the basis of publicly available data. But NASA has never released its own processing of these photos," - said in a press release.
A characteristic feature of Europe is the reddish cracks in the satellite’s ice crust. As seen in the processed image of Europe, the north and south poles of the satellite (left and right) are bluer than its equatorial regions. Astronomers believe that this difference in shade can be explained by the different sizes of ice crystals.
Scientists believe that the reddish areas stained with chemicals are a tectonic history of the satellite. A better understanding of ice dynamics could shed light on the residential potential of Europe.
Europe, as you know, hides the ocean under its global layer of ice, which contains more liquid water than all the oceans on Earth. Heating the core of the planet can be a potential for extraterrestrial aquatic biosphere. But until we send a mission to test this hypothesis, life in Europe remains only a hypothesis.
