Callisto: Dirty Battered Iceball

About This Image

Its surface is the most densely cratered in the Solar System -- but what's inside? Jupiter's moon Callisto is a battered ball of dirty ice that is slightly smaller than the planet Mercury. It was visited by NASA's Galileo spacecraft in the 1990s and 2000s, but the recently reprocessed featured image is from a flyby of NASA's Voyager 2 in 1979. The moon would appear darker if it weren't for the tapestry of light-colored fractured surface ice created by eons of impacts. The interior of Callisto is potentially even more interesting because therein might lie an internal layer of liquid water. This potential underground sea is a candidate to harbor life -- similar with sister moons Europa and Ganymede. Callisto is larger than Luna, Earth's Moon, and even with its high ice content is still more massive. ESA's JUICE and NASA's Europa Clipper missions are now headed out to Jupiter to better investigate its largest moons.