NASA's Closest-Ever Pictures Of Europa To Be Shown

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Contact: Jane Platt                            February 27, 1998

NASA'S CLOSEST-EVER PICTURES OF EUROPA TO BE SHOWN

New images taken by NASA's Galileo's spacecraft during its closest-ever flyby of Jupiter's moon Europa will be unveiled on Mon., March 2, at a briefing to be held at Brown University, Providence, RI. The new pictures, taken during the spacecraft's Dec. 16, 1997 flyby will be available, along with new Galileo animation, on NASA TV and on the Internet. The briefing itself will not be televised.

Europa holds great fascination for scientists because of the prospects that a liquid ocean might lie underneath its icy crust. The presence of water would increase the odds that life may have existed at some point in Europa's history.

Briefing participants describing the new Europa closeups will include Galileo imaging team leader Dr. Mike Belton of the National Optical Astronomical Observatories, Tuscon, AZ, and four Galileo team members from Brown University: Dr. James Head, Dr. Robert Pappalardo, Geoff Collins and Louise Prockter.

The new pictures include high-resolution views of rough, broadly scalloped icy cliffs on Europa as high as Mt. Rushmore. Other images show an impact crater named Pwyll and the so-called Conamara Chaos region, where icy plates on the surface have broken apart and moved around. One large, icy fracture is big enough to be spanned by the Brooklyn Bridge.

New Galileo animation presents a high-resolution look at "wedged terrain" on Europa where new material has risen from below the surface, causing crustal plates to spread and be replaced by newer material. This plate tectonic activity resembles crusts formed in some areas of Earth's sea floor.

The Galileo mission, which continues through December 1999, includes eight Europa flybys, four of the moon Callisto and one or two of the moon Io, depending on the spacecraft's health. The current mission focusing on Europa is a follow-up to Galileo's two-year primary mission through the Jovian system. JPL manages the mission for NASA's Office of Space Science, Washington, DC. JPL is a division of California Institute of Technology.

Images and animation will be transmitted on NASA Television on Mon., March 2 at 9 a.m. and at 12, 3, 6 p.m. (all times Pacific). NASA Television is available through GE-2, transponder 9C at 85 degrees west longitude, vertical polarization, with a frequency of 3880 Mhz, and audio at 6.8 MHz. The new images will be released on the Internet at the following URLs:

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/galileo/
http://galileo.ivv.nasa.gov/
http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov

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