Unmasking Europa : the search for life on Jupiter's ocean moon

Summary: The second-outward of Jupiter's four major moons, Europa is covered with ice, as confirmed in views from modern telescopes and the thousands of images returned by NASA's Voyager and Galileo missions. But these higher-resolution views also showed that the ice is anything but smooth. In fact, Europa's surface is covered with vast criss-crossing systems of mountain-sized ridges, jumbled regions of seemingly chaotic terrain, and patches that suggest upwellings of new surface materials from below. How scientists think about the underlying forces that shaped this incredibly complex, bizarre, and beautiful surface is the subject of this book.

Item details

ISBN: 9780387479361
ISBN: 0387479368
ISBN: 9780387096766
ISBN: 0387096760
Physical Description: print
image/jpeg
x, 277 pages, 8 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations (some color) ; 24 cm
Publisher: New York : Copernicus Books, ©2008.

Contents / Notes

General Note:	"An imprint of Springer Science+Business Media, in association with Praxis Publishing Ltd."
Bibliography, etc. Note:	Includes bibliographical references and index.
Formatted Contents Note:	Preface -- Water world -- Touring the surface -- Doing science -- Planetary stretch -- A closer look at tidal effects -- Global crack patterns -- Building ridges -- Mind the gap -- Strike-slip -- Convergence -- Return to Astypalaea -- Cycloids -- Chaos -- Thick vs. thin -- The scars of impact -- The bandwagon -- The biosphere -- Explorations to come.