Researchers Create Geological Map of Jupiter's Largest Moon 'Ganymede'

A team of international scientists and geologists has created the first full scale geological map of Ganymede - Jupiter's largest moon.

Scientists along with geologists at the Brown University have completed the first global geological map of Ganymede using images taken during NASA's Voyager Mission in 1979 and the Orbital Galileo Mission in 1995. Geological mapping of Ganymede was a lengthy and complex task.

The project was led by Geoffrey Collins, a Ph.D. a professor at Wheaton College in Massachusetts. Ganymede's has a rough, fragmented terrain and might even have an underground water source which is why researchers believe that it might harbour alien life. The team believes that this geological map will help explorations that will be conducted in the future.

"It is very rewarding to see the results of all of our efforts here at Brown come together into this integrated global compilation that will now be used to plan the next phase of scientific exploration of the Galilean satellites," map's co author Jim Head, the Scherck Distinguished Professor of Geological Sciences at Brown said in a statement.

Ganymede was discovered by Galileo Galilei on 7 January 1610. It is the largest satellite in the solar system, about three quarters the size of Mars. Ganymede is the only moon in the entire solar system that has a magnetosphere.

To create the map, the scientists used the images captured by NASA's two spacecrafts namely Voyager and Galileo.

The first mission to the Jupiter satellite system was Voyager. It was in 1979 that the spacecraft passed by Ganymede's icy surface.  The images captured during this mission reveal a complex surface with different terrains. Later, in the year 1995, Galileo spacecraft was placed in the orbit around Jupiter. This spacecraft returned high resolution images of the planet's surface and offered strong information on the surface that deepened the understanding of several features that were seen at low resolution by Voyager.

Head who was the co-investigator on the Galileo's Solid State Imaging (SSI) experiment, planned the imaging sequences for Ganymede in order to identify and investigate the high priority scientific targets and then review them with the SSI team.

"This was an amazing time," Head said. "Brown graduate and undergraduate students worked shoulder-to-shoulder in the Planetary Geosciences Laboratory in Lincoln Field Building, studying the newly acquired images and choosing new sites of scientific interest. The discoveries were daily and the adrenaline was surging as we rushed to collect our thoughts and plans, review them with the SSI Team, and get them uploaded to the spacecraft in time for the next encounter."

The map was published by the U.S. Geological Survey.