Galileo spacecraft captures image of chaos terrain on Europa

Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – @BednarChuck

A newly-released image of Europa captured by NASA’s Galileo spacecraft shows a portion of the Jovian moon’s crust known as Conamara Chaos that is marked by long grooves etched into its shattered chunks of ice and criss-cross along the surface.

According to the European Space Agency, these features are an example of what is called “chaos terrain”, a feature also observed on Mars and Mercury. Chaos terrain is an astrogeological term used to describe the region of a planet’s landscape where surface features like ridges, cracks, and plains appear to be jumbled together and enmeshed with one another.

While the ESA explains that the exact ways in which chaos regions form are largely unknown, scientists studying Europa have a few ideas how they came to be on the Jovian moon. One such possibility is that fast-moving impactors smash through its brittle crust.

Underneath that crust lies a liquid layer, which means that fragments would be more mobile and capable of refreezing in new configurations. This phenomenon could result in “a fractured terrain with young scars carved into the icy plains,” the organization said in a statement.

JUICE should help solve the mystery

Another possibility, according to the space agency, is the possible presence of a series of shallow lakes beneath the moon’s surface. This could create stress and influence the crust from beneath, causing thin sheets of ice on Europa to fracture and collapse.

Even though astronomers have studied the moon in great detail, the only way to truly understand its structure and composition is to send a probe there to analyze its interior, the ESA said. Such a spacecraft, the JUpiter ICy moons Explorer (JUICE), will do just that once it launches in 2022.

JUICE is scheduled to explore and characterize three of Jupiter’s potentially habitable icy moons – Ganymede, Europa and Callisto – once it reaches its destination in 2030, as well as the gas giant itself. JUICE, the first large-class mission in the ESA’s Cosmic Vision 2015-2025 program, will be using an instrument suite including cameras, spectrometers, a radar and an altimeter.

It will be studying the  atmosphere, magnetosphere, and tenuous set of rings around Jupiter, and is scheduled to become the first probe to orbit and investigate Ganymede, the agency noted. The mission “will give us an unrivalled and in-depth understanding of the Jovian system and of these moons” during its lifetime, they added.

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