Scientists Complete First Geological Global Map Of Jupiter's Satellite Ganymede

Top: A global mosaic of Jupiter's moon Ganymede, constructed from the best images collected during flybys of the Voyager 1, Voyager 2, and Galileo spacecraft. Bottom: A few layers of the geologic map of Ganymede, showing the boundaries between light terrain (white) and dark terrain (brown), and the massive number of tectonic features in the light terrain (black lines). The map is being used to analyze stress fields that could have been responsible for ripping apart the surface of Ganymede in the past (red arrows). (Credit: Image courtesy of Europlanet Media Centre)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Sep. 18, 2009) — Scientists have assembled the first global geological map of the Solar System’s largest moon – and in doing so have gathered new evidence into the formation of the large, icy satellite.

Wes Patterson, a planetary scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, led a seven-year effort to craft a detailed map of geological features on Ganymede, the largest moon of Jupiter. Patterson and a half-dozen scientists from several institutions compiled the global map – only the third ever completed of a moon, after Earth’s moon and Jupiter’s cratered satellite Callisto – using images from NASA’s historic Voyager and Galileo missions.

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