Small Craters on Europa

This high resolution view of the Conamara Chaos region on Jupiter's icy moon, Europa, reveals craters which range in size from about 98 feet (30 meters) to slightly over a quarter of a mile (over 450 meters) in diameter. The large number of craters seen here is unusual for Europa. This section of Conamara Chaos lies inside a bright ray of material which was ejected by the large impact crater, Pwyll, 620 miles (1000 kilometers) to the south. The presence of craters within the bright ray suggests that many are secondaries which formed from chunks of material that were thrown out by the enormous energy of the impact which formed Pwyll.

North is to the upper right of the picture and the sun illuminates the surface from the east. The image, centered at 9 degrees latitude and 274 degrees longitude, covers an area approximately 5 by 2.5 miles (8 by 4 kilometers). The finest details that can be discerned in this picture are about 66 feet (20 meters) across. The images were taken on Dec. 16, 1997 at a range of 590 miles (960 kilometers) by the Solid State Imaging (SSI) system on NASA's Galileo spacecraft.