Image: Amalthea

Description: Image of the inner Jovian moon Amalthea, taken January 4, 2000 by NASA's Galileo spacecraft at a range of 238,000 kilometers (about 148,000 miles). The highest-resolution image ever obtained for Amalthea. The image resolve surface features as small as 2.4 kilometers (about 1.5 miles) across. In late 1999 and early 2000, near the end of a two-year mission extension known as the Galileo Europa Mission, the Galileo spacecraft dipped closer to Jupiter than it had been since it first went into orbit around the giant planet in 1995. These maneuvers allowed Galileo to make three flybys of the volcanically active moon Io and also made possible these new high-quality images of Thebe, Amalthea, and Metis, which lie very close to Jupiter, inside the orbit of Io. We are viewing the side of the moon that faces permanently away from Jupiter, and north is approximately up. The large white region near the south pole of Amalthea marks the location of the brightest patch of surface material seen anywhere on the moon. This unusual material, which sits inside a large crater named Gaea, has been greatly overexposed; accordingly, the white area on this image is somewhat larger than the actual bright area on Amalthea. Note also the "scalloped" or "sawtooth" shape of Amalthea's terminator (the line between day and night, at the left-hand edge of Amalthea's disk), which indicates that parts of this satellite's surface are very rough, with many small hills and valleys.
Title: Amalthea
Credit: http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA02531
Author: NASA
Permission: Public domainPublic domainfalsefalse This file is in the public domain in the United States because it was solely created by NASA. NASA copyright policy states that "NASA material is not protected by copyright unless noted". (See Template:PD-USGov, NASA copyright policy page or JPL Image Use Policy.) Warnings: Use of NASA logos, insignia and emblems is restricted per U.S. law 14 CFR 1221. The NASA website hosts a large number of images from the Soviet/Russian space agency, and other non-American space agencies. These are not necessarily in the public domain. Materials based on Hubble Space Telescope data may be copyrighted if they are not explicitly produced by the STScI.[1] See also Template:PD-Hubble and Template:Cc-Hubble. The SOHO (ESA & NASA) joint project implies that all materials created by its probe are copyrighted and require permission for commercial non-educational use. [2] Images featured on the Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD) web site may be copyrighted. [3] The National Space Science Data Center (NSSDC) site has been known to host copyrighted content. Its photo gallery FAQ states that all of the images in the photo gallery are in the public domain "Unless otherwise noted."
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License: Public domain
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