Exploratour - The Surface of Europa

This is an image of the surface of Europa.
Click on image for full size
NASA

The first sets of pictures, such as the one here, revealed a surprising lack of craters!? If you look closely at the full sized image you can see for yourself that the surface is very smooth with very few craters. You can compare this surface with the surface of neighboring Callisto (next page) to really see the difference. That is not to say that there are no craters on the surface. There are some really beautiful ones, but we will get to that later. This puzzling phenomena told scientists that they had misjudged the age of Europa's surface.

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