'These ground-based observations whet the appetite for our future exploration of Jupiter’s moons' - Professor Leigh Fletcher.
The mixture of chemicals that make up the frozen surfaces on two of Jupiter’s largest moons have been revealed in the most detailed images of them ever taken by a telescope on Earth.
“The modelling found that there could be a variety of different salts present on the surface, but suggested that infrared spectroscopy alone is generally unable to identify which specific types of salt are present.” The images and spectra of Europa, published in the Planetary Science Journal, reveal that Europa’s crust is mainly composed of frozen water ice with non-ice materials contaminating the surface.
Researchers also mapped how the size of the grains of ice on Ganymede varies across the surface and the possible distributions of a variety of different salts, some of which may originate from within the moon itself.
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