Ammonia-Bearing Compounds Discovered at Surface of Jupiter’s Moon Europa
Advanced analysis of decades-old data from NASA’s Galileo spacecraft identifies ammonia-containing compounds discovered on the surface of Jupiter’s moon Europa, as shown in this composite image. Zooming in on an area about 400 kilometers wide, the black-and-white mosaic on the right is made up of several images from Galileo’s solid-state imaging camera. Representations of data from the spacecraft’s Near-Infrared Mapping Spectrometer (NIMS) instrument are overlaid: red pixels mark locations where ammonia-containing compounds were detected; purple pixels indicate no detection of compounds. The NIMS data were captured during Galileo’s 11th orbit around Jupiter in 1997.
The dark, crisscrossing bands in the underlying image represent the fracturing of Europa’s icy surface. The detection of ammonia-containing compounds near these features could indicate that they were actively placed there by cryovolcanic processes bringing up liquid water from Europa’s vast underground ocean.
Launched in 1989 and managed by the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, NASA’s Galileo mission concluded its extended mission to the Jupiter system in September 2003. Caltech manages JPL for NASA.
