In the Solar System · tracked live
Europa
The smallest of Jupiter's four large moons, a little smaller than ours, with one of the smoothest solid surfaces in the Solar System: a shell of water ice some fifteen to twenty-five kilometres thick, crossed by long dark cracks and hardly cratered, over a salt-water ocean that probably holds about twice the water of all the Earth's seas. Jupiter flexes it once every three and a half days, and the heat of that flexing is what keeps the ocean liquid. Europa Clipper, launched in 2024, is due there in 2030. This map places it as Jupiter's position plus one fitted loop of its orbit, and the error of that fit is printed below rather than hidden in the figures above it.
- Radius
- 1,561 km
- Around the equator
- 9,807 km
- From the Sun
- 794,598,256 km (+353,839 km/d)
- From the Earth
- 869,386,811 km (-1,484,404 km/d)
- A signal takes
- 48 min
- Goes round
- Jupiter
- Placed to within
- 15,149 km
Distances and speed are computed from JPL Horizons trajectories and are true of the date below, changing at the rate beside each.
Everything the map shows is worked out in your browser from published orbital data - nothing on it is a stored picture of where things were.