Landing sites on Europa identified

www.newscientist.com...

A RIGOROUS analysis of the jagged terrain of Jupiter's moon Europa is helping to identify safe landing strips for future missions.

Europa is thought to have an ocean of water beneath its icy shell. The latest study is the first to use images from the Galileo spacecraft, which orbited Jupiter from 1995 to 2003, to generate measurements of Europa's slopes. "This is the first quantitative sampling that gives hard numbers, real numbers that you can believe," says Paul Schenk of the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, Texas.

Schenk used shadows, plus pictures taken from two different angles, combined into 3D images, to calculate the slopes of various regions of Europa. He examined four different kinds of terrain: ridged plains that make up the majority of the surface; impact craters; so-called "chaos" regions where icebergs appear to float in a frozen soup; and long smooth stripes called dilational bands.

Isn't this almost identical to the method used in WW2 spy planes? Rather than 3d imagery they just placed two photos on top of each other though?

Still pretty cool we have found places that look "safe" to land there. Europa seems like a very interesting moon...

Please include a working link for any externally quoted material.

[edit on Tue Aug 25 2009 by Jbird]

It is intresting, this prove that Ice Shells can surround a planet, and it cant be disproven Earth dint have one long ago either.

Until this find, the ice canapee theory of Kent Hovin among others dont seem so far fetched after all, does it ?

Here comes the smart comments, I can hear them :' that is a small moon, not an huge earth.' .. It is simple, can it be on one heavenly body, it can be on more..

Hey, lets say there are life under there, and we, 'Gods' descends from heaven . Hehe ..

Realy nice that they do find things that prove 'old' theories..

Seems like ti taking FOREVER to get to Europa...i rememebr reading about going to Europa as far back as 1990! AStronomy magazines. Here we are, 19 years laer, adn nothing. Hell, Galileo was supose to be laucnhed in 1986 i belive, but becasue of the challnger incident, fundig was cut. But at least9 or 10 years later, thye got it thier. I wonder if the europas lander cameras will have bettter quality images than what NASA seems to be using these days. Voyager and Galileo spacecraft had exceptional state of the art steroe cameras, for thier time. Yuode think by todays standars technology would have adbaced. I mean, the LRO and tthe images of the apollo ladning sites. Yeah the moon looks awesome and all, but did they forget to leave the ZOOM feature off the camera to save costs?
Im just feeling and thiknig, WHen we get their to Europa, the images from its surface wont be as grand as wede all like to see and expect. Nothing new, just looks like a bigger image on the surface than from in orbit. Hopefully, im wrong.
Regardless, it would be amazing and truely awesome, too see what the surface loks like with a lander on it! I knida wish ESA had made their own 'mars rover' for Titan, not something that would sit on one place and die when the batterys ran dead. since their spending the time and money! get out n expore the surface! USe those funds to every available beeathtaking chance to elarn something new..thats what i say

reply to post by ChemBreather

Hovind's silly "ice canopy" idea puts a shell of ice overhead, in the sky. Europa's presumed ocean of liquid water is thought to be covered by a layer of ice, like the sea around Earth's north pole.

I don't see the comparison.

[edit on 8/24/2009 by Phage]

reply to post by ChemBreather

...the ice canapee theory of Kent Hovin...

You mean Kent Hovind....

Is that nutjob out of prison now?? I can't keep track.