File:Amalthea.gif

English: 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.