New, Stunning Image of Europa Reveals Details About the Icy World (VIDEO)

NASA scientists have remastered our view of Europa. They've used a mosaic of color images from NASA's Galileo spacecraft and have used modern image processing techniques in order to create a better image of this icy world.

Europa itself orbits Jupiter. It's an icy world that possibly has a subsurface ocean. In fact, Europa represents the most promising location in our solar system other than Earth to look for present-day environments that are suitable for life. The Galileo mission actually found strong evidence that a subsurface ocean of salty water is in contact with a rocky seafloor, which could possibly provide environments to sustain simple life forms.

The new color view of Europa shows the largest portion of the moon's surface at the highest resolution. In earlier views, in contrast, featured colors had been strongly enhanced. The newer image actually more closely approximates what the human eye would see in this case.

The image actually features many long, curving and linear fractures in the moon's bright icy shell. Currently, scientists are eager to learn if the reddish-brown fractures and other markings contain clues about the geological history of this moon.

Want to learn more? Check out the video below, courtesy of YouTube.