WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Galileo spacecraft, having braved Jupiter's lethal radiation belts, has captured high-resolution images of three of the planet's four innermost moons -- Thebe, Amalthea and Metis, scientists said on Monday.

The images, which dribbled back to Earth from a single, low-power antenna aboard the spacecraft, showed two views of Amalthea, a 155-mile (250-km) long, irregularly shaped moon that has a bright streak on it nicknamed ``Ida.''

The images suggested that Ida, which is 31 miles (50 km) long, could have been kicked up by a meteoroid impact or could mark the crest of a local ridge, Damon Simonelli of Cornell University's Center for Radiophysics and Space Research, said in a statement.

The researchers, who include teams at the National Optical Astronomy Observatories in Tucson, Arizona, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, and Cornell, said they were pleased to get any images at all.

Soon after it was launched in 1989, Galileo lost the use of its main, umbrella-shaped, high-gain antenna.

Researchers were forced to use a less powerful antenna to get the images, and then used computers to enhance them. They can be seen on the Internet at http://www.news.cornell.edu/releases/April00/Simonelli.moons.deb.html