Spacecraft imagery & limitations

These mosaics help identify real surface features. They have differing coverage, resolution, processing and color. They are not uniform natural-color photographs, and are not intended for scientific measurements.

• Sun and planetary maps, Earth’s Moon: Solar System Scope, CC BY 4.0. Visualizations derived from mission imagery. Maps are applied to simplified spheres or spheroids.
• Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto: courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech; Caltech/JPL/USGS. JPL texture catalog. Io uses processed color; Europa, Ganymede and Callisto use cleaned Voyager grayscale mosaics. Seams and varying resolution remain.
• Pluto: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI. New Horizons global color map, released 2017. Multispectral processed color; the southern gap has no mapped surface data.
• Charon: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute. PIA19866, 2015 preliminary grayscale mosaic. Coverage is incomplete, especially in the south.
• Triton: courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech; Caltech/JPL/USGS; Tammy Becker. JPL texture catalog. Very limited Voyager coverage; large portions are unmapped.

Patterned gray means missing map data. The renderer replaces black coverage gaps on Pluto, Charon and Triton with a neutral checker pattern. No terrain is generated to fill those gaps. Longitude registration is illustrative; spacecraft maps are not fitted to a dated orientation ephemeris.

Bodies without suitable maps use plain representative colors. Titan is shown with opaque haze. Unknown-radius moons use outlined markers. Ring geometry is simplified; no texture claims to show individual ring particles.

JPL image-use policy · NASA media guidance. These credits do not imply agency endorsement. Asset provenance and original image links.