“It’s very early in the process, but by all indications Juno’s flyby of Europa was a great success,” said Scott Bolton, Juno principal investigator from Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio.
As you can see from these stunning close-ups from Juno’s two-megapixel camera, Europa has a mess of ridges and bands crisscrossing its surface. It’s often referred to as a “chaos terrain” by planetary geologists.
Juno’s flyby of Europa last week was the third-closest ever performed. The second-closest images came from NASA’s Voyager 2 in 1979, which imaged brown stripes on its surface that suggested cracks.