# PIA19048 realistic color Europa mosaic edited

- By: NASA / Jet Propulsion Lab-Caltech / SETI Institute
- Date: 2014-11-21
- Classification: Photograph
- Credit line: http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA19048 Also described here: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2014-406
- Museum: [Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:PIA19048_realistic_color_Europa_mosaic_edited.jpg)
- Rights: Public domain
- Picture: https://invisiblenetwork.ai/thumbs/commons/thumb/6/6c/PIA19048_realistic_color_Europa_mosaic_edited.jpg/1920px-PIA19048_realistic_color_Europa_mosaic_edited.jpg
- Who can see it: Teens profiles and older (museums give no ratings; placed by Invisible Network from the museum's own words)

Uploader's notes: the original NASA TIFF image has been modified by increasing linear pixel dimensions by a factor of 1.6 (to bring out fine detail), sharpening and conversion to JPEG format.

Original caption released with image:

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. This is the color view of Europa from Galileo that shows the largest portion of the moon's surface at the highest resolution.

The view was previously released as a mosaic with lower resolution and strongly enhanced color (see PIA02590). To create this new version, the images were assembled into a realistic color view of the surface that approximates how Europa would appear to the human eye.

The scene shows the stunning diversity of Europa's surface geology. Long, linear cracks and ridges crisscross the surface, interrupted by regions of disrupted terrain where the surface ice crust has been broken up and re-frozen into new patterns.

Color variations across the surface are associated with differences in geologic feature type and location. For example, areas that appear…