NASA just announced they'll be visiting this beautiful moon for the first timeBusiness Insider
By Jessica Orwig 18 minutes ago
Europa floats in front of Jupiter. NASA / JPL-CaltechThe hunt for extraterrestrial life just grew a little hotter.
On Monday, during his "State of NASA" speech, administrator Charles Bolden announced that NASA will be selecting projects to accompany a probe to Jupiter's moon Europa.
Floating in space about 390 million miles from earth, Europa is a remote ice ball that harbors a massive ocean underneath its surface.
So massive, in fact, that scientists suspect Europa could have as much as two to three times more liquid water than Earth!
Judging from the abundance of life thriving in Earth's oceans: Where there's liquid water, there's the potential for life.
Not only that, Europa is absolutely gorgeous:
NASA/JPL-Caltech/SETI InstituteEuropa is about 1,900 miles in diameter — slightly smaller than our moon. The brown veins that give the moon it's iconic beauty are still a mystery, but the leading theory is that they show where Europa's crust cracked open letting warmer, dirtier water seep through and then freeze.
Jupiter's strong gravitational tug on the tiny moon generates tidal forces that stretch the entire surface — similar to how the Moon's gravity tugs the water in Earth's oceans, creating tides. The stretching then cracks the crust letting water deeper beneath the surface to seap through.
But that's not the only impact the gas giant has on its moon. As NASA astrobiologist Kevin Hand explains in a video
about Europa:
The reason that Europa has liquid water is because it's orbiting Jupiter and the tidal tug and pull causes Europa to flex up and down and all that tidal energy turns into friction and heat that helps maintain this liquid water ocean beneath and icy shell.
NASABelow is a close up of the circular impact crater in the southern hemisphere in the image above. Called Pwyll, the impact crater is a relatively new feature on the surface of Europa, and it is also compelling evidence of the enormous ocean sloshing underneath the surface.
Scientists suspect that when the impactor hit, it splattered fresh, fine water ice particles everywhere that now show up as the bright-white arms adorning the moon's face around the darker crater. NASA's Galileo spacecraft — the only probe to flyby Europa more than once — took the image below in 1998. Showing the darker crater, which is about 16 miles in diameter.
NASA/JPL/University of ArizonaThe impact crater's arms reach far across the surface. Even 620 miles north of the crater you can see evidence of the white streaks in the awesome close-up shot below.
The white and blue colors are the residual ice particles from the blast. Galileo snapped this photo of this region, which is 44 miles wide by 19 miles long, in 1996.
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