Europa Impact Date: 04.04.1997 This feature on Jupiter's moon Europa was seen as a dark, diffuse circular patch on a previous Galileo global image of Europa's leading hemisphere. The bulls-eye pattern appears to be a 140-kilometer-wide impact scar (about the size of the island of Hawai'i) that formed as the surface fractured minutes after a mountain-sized asteroid or comet slammed into the satellite. This approximately 214-kilometer-wide picture is the product of three images that have been processed in false color to enhance shapes and compositions.
North is toward the top of this picture, which is illuminated from sunlight coming from the west. This color composite reveals a sequence of events, that have modified the surface of Europa. The earliest event was the impact that formed the Tyre structure at 340N latitude and 146.50W longitude. This impact was followed by the formation of the reddish lines superposed on Tyre. The red color designates areas that are probably a dirty water-ice mixture. The fine blue-green lines crossing the region from west to east appear to be ridges that formed after the crater.
The images were taken on April 4, 1997, at a resolution of 595 meters per picture element and a range of 29,000 kilometers. The images were taken by the Galileo spacecraft's Solid-State Imaging System.
