A spacecraft flying past Europa may be able to sample its colossal watery plumes – even if they stopped erupting weeks earlier. A new analysis suggests that jets spewing from Jupiter’s icy moon could produce complex, constantly shifting chemical patterns in its atmosphere, which we could use to figure out what is on, and even below, the surface.
Europa is thought to host a deep, salty ocean beneath an icy shell, and this ocean could be one of the best places to look for life in the solar system. In 2012, the Hubble Space Telescope spotted evidence that plumes of water vapour are vented from this subsurface sea into space.
That was good news for proposed missions to explore the moon and test its oceans for signs of life. Both NASA and the European Space Agency have missions in the works, targeted for launch in the early 2020s, that will fly past Europa.
”Those are free samples: we can just fly by and we can grab some of that material,” says Cynthia Phillips at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. “That’s our best way of understanding what’s going on – not just at Europa’s surface but, in the case of plume sampling, the subsurface – from orbit.”
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