";s:4:"text";s:3694:"Instead of craters, there appear to be strange cracks extending for many kilometers over the surface of the moon. Europa’s most striking geological features on the surface are dark lines which criss-cross across the entire surface…
This close-up view of the icy surface of Europa, a moon of Jupiter, was obtained on December 20, 1996, by the Solid State Imaging system on board the Galileo spacecraft during its fourth orbit around Jupiter. Europa’s surface is made of frozen water and is the smoothest in the Solar System. NASA's Europa Mission is slated for launch in 2022. The lack of large impact craters on the surface of Europa is consistent with a thin icy crust that has been broken into pieces by tidal forces below which is a subsurface ocean of water Much of Europa's surface appears chaotic and clogged with huge iceberg-like blocks. This is the color view of Europa from Galileo that shows the largest portion of the moon's surface … The view is about 11 kilometers by 16 kilometers (7 miles by … It's not humans going there of course, but a Jupiter orbiter with lots of close passes by Europa and a wealth of advanced scientific instruments to map and study the planet is far better, at this point, than humans going up there anyway. Europa is very different from the other moons of Jupiter. The puzzling, fascinating surface of Jupiter's icy moon Europa looms large in this newly reprocessed color view, made from images taken by NASA's Galileo spacecraft in the late 1990s. Instead of craters, there appear to be strange cracks that reach for many kilometers over the surface of the moon. Instead of a rocky, cratered surface like Callisto and Ganymede, it instead has a smooth outer surface of cracked ice.