Galileo images and mosaics of Europa Options

[tedstryk]

I have worked on sprucing up some global views of Europa from Galileo. There are a few more global views I hope to get to eventually. But the best two at nearly full phase benefited a lot.



[Moderator note: There are several more threads containing Galileo Europa images but they all contain several inactive image links. The main threads are:
http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.php?showtopic=2016
http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.php?showtopic=2174
http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.php?showtopic=2222
http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.php?showtopic=2082
http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.php?showtopic=2142 ]

[Bjorn Jonsson]

This is a mosaic of the Galileo I25 Europa images:



The 12 images comprising the mosaic were obtained on November 25, 1999 at a distance of 96000 km from Europa. This is the only good global coverage of Europa's Jupiter facing hemisphere. For aesthetic purposes I filled some narrow horizontal gaps by cloning nearby data.

For many years I have wanted to do something with the Europa images but didn't, mainly because a new mission that can image Europa at high resolution didn't seem that far in the future (a decade or so until Jupiter arrival isn't that much in this context). But now I have given up waiting - by now it has become pretty clear that nothing of significance is going to happen until almost 20 years from now when JUICE arrives at Jupiter. The good thing though is that this mission seems very likely to actually happen - more likely than previous mission concepts ever have been.

Because of this long time until the next spacecraft that can obtain hi-res images of Europa arrives I decided to start work on a 16384x8192 pixel global map of Europa using all of the useful Galileo and Voyager images. This mosaic is a 'by-product' from that project.

Interestingly the only mosaic I have found from the I25 data is only 900x900 pixels and has obvious seams since the brightness of the original images is variable:

http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA02528