North is to the top right of the picture, and the sun illuminates the surface from the east. Europa showing cliffs along the edges of high-standing ice plates. The washboard texture of the older terrain has been broken into plates which are separated by material with a jumbled texture. The cliffs themselves are rough and broadly scalloped, and smooth debris shed from the cliff faces is piled along the base. For scale, the height of the cliffs and size of the scalloped indentations are comparable to the famous cliff face of Mt. Rushmore in South Dakota.
North is to the top right of the picture, and the sun illuminates the surface from the east.
During its twelfth orbit around Jupiter, NASA's Galileo spacecraft made its closest pass of Jupiter's satellite Europa, soaring within a few hundred kilometers of the icy surface. This image was taken near the closest approach point, and is the highest resolution image of Europa that will be obtained by Galileo. The image was taken at a highly oblique angle, providing a vantage point similar to looking out of an airplane window, with the features at the bottom of the image being much closer to the viewer than those at the top of the image. Many bright ridges are seen in the image, with dark material in the low-lying valleys. In the center of the image, the regular ridges and valleys give way to a darker region of jumbled hills, which may be one of the many dark pits observed on the surface of Europa.