Callisto: Soiled Battered Iceball

Its surface is perchance the most densely cratered in the Solar System — however what’s interior? Jupiter’s moon Callisto is a battered ball of dirty ice that is higher than the planet Mercury. It used to be visited by NASA’s Galileo spacecraft in the 1990s and 2000s, however the recently reprocessed featured image is from a flyby of NASA’s Voyager 2 in 1979. The moon would seem darker if it weren’t for the tapestry of gentle-coloured fractured surface ice created by eons of impacts. The interior of Callisto is doubtlessly even extra attention-grabbing because of the therein may perhaps well maybe lie an interior layer of liquid water. This capacity underground sea is a candidate to harbor life — the same with sister moons Europa and Ganymede. Callisto is barely higher than Luna, Earth’s Moon, however thanks to its excessive ice whisper material is barely less broad. ESA’s JUICE and NASA’s Europa Clipper missions are now headed out to Jupiter to better investigate its largest moons.