Jupiter’s moon Europa ‘most likely’ place to support life

Jupiter’s icy moon Europa, which is thought to have a surface ocean of salty water, is the most likely to support the survival of simple microorganisms.

“Europa is the most likely place in our solar system beyond Earth to possess life,” Robert Pappalardo, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, was quoted as saying by AFP. “And it is the place we should be exploring now that we have a concept mission we think is the right one to get there for an affordable cost,” he continued.

According to Pappalardo, due to the thin ice shelf and an ocean, Europa is more promising than Mars in terms of habitability.  

In order to explore Europa, JPL and the Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland developed a new exploration project named Clipper with a total cost of $2 billion. The spacecraft would orbit around Jupiter and make a detailed survey of the icy surface of Europa. This mission has yet to be approved and could be rejected from future budgets.

Pappalardo states that the spacecraft could be launched in 2021 or 2022 and would take 3-6 years to reach Europa. NASA is not funding the Clipper mission, but they can participate in the ESA’s ‘Jupiter Icy Moon Explorer’.

The probe, called Clipper, will be designed to survey the surface of Europa. Using ice-penetrating radar and infrared sensors, Clipper will survey the surface of Jupiter’s moon, Pappalardo was quoted as saying in the Independent.

Data from this mission will be used for future missions that will hunt for evidence of life on the moon, Pappalardo told the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Boston.

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Moon, Jupiter create celestial treat this week

Large body of water found on Jupiter’s moon Europa

Scientists from The University of Texas at Austin said they have discovered a body of liquid water the volume of the North American Great Lakes inside one of Jupiter’s moons.

The team said that the water could represent a potential habitat for life, and many more lakes might exist throughout the shallow regions of Europa‘s shell.

The lake is covered by floating ice shelves that appear to be collapsing, which could provide a mechanism for transferring nutrients and energy between the surface and a vast ocean already inferred to exist below the thick ice shell.

“One opinion in the scientific community has been, ‘If the ice shell is thick, that’s bad for biology — that it might mean the surface isn’t communicating with the underlying ocean,’” lead author Britney Schmidt, a postdoctoral fellow at The University of Texas, said in a press release. “Now we see evidence that even though the ice shell is thick, it can mix vigorously. That could make Europa and its ocean more habitable.”

The scientists focused on Galileo spacecraft images of two circular, bumpy features on Europa’s surface known as chaos terrain. The researchers developed a four-step model to explain how the features form on Europa. The model resolves several conflicting observations, some of which suggest that either the ice shell is thick or that it is thin.

“I read the paper and immediately thought, yes, that’s it, that makes sense,” Robert Pappalardo, senior research scientist at NASA’s Planetary Science Section who did not participate in the study said in a press release. “It’s the only convincing model that fits the full range of observations. To me, that says yes, that’s the right answer.”

The only true confirmation of the inferred lakes would come from a future spacecraft mission designed to probe the ice shell. A mission like this was rated as the second-highest priority flagship mission by the National Research Council’s recent Planetary Decadal Survey.

“This new understanding of processes on Europa would not have been possible without the foundation of the last 20 years of observations over Earth’s ice sheets and floating ice shelves,” Don Blankenship, a co-author and senior research scientist at the Institute for Geophysics, said in a press release.

The research paper “Active formation of ‘chaos terrain’ over shallow subsurface water on Europa” will be published in the journal Nature.

The European Space Agency is to mount a billion-euro mission to Jupiter and its icy moons.

The probe, called Juice, has just been approved at a meeting of member state delegations in Paris.

It would be built in time for a launch in 2022, although it would be a further eight years before it reached the Jovian system.

The mission has emerged from a five-year-long competition to find the next “large class” space venture in Europe.

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Two new moons have been found orbiting Jupiter, bringing the Jovian family count up to 66 natural satellites

Tiny satellites add to planet’s “backward” swarm, astronomers say.

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“Great Lakes” Discovered on Jupiter Moon?

Giant water body may be source of otherworldly life, study says.

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The Atlas 5 rocket launched from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station after a brief delay caused by a helium leak.

A $1.1bn (£0.7bn) unmanned Nasa space mission has launched from Florida on a journey to the planet Jupiter.

The Juno spacecraft will cruise beyond Mars to put itself in orbit around the gas giant in 2016.

It is the first solar-powered mission to venture this far from the Sun.