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Loading contentEuropa is one of the four Galilean moons of Jupiter, covered by a shell of water ice.
moon:europaDataset membership
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Europa, a Galilean moon of Jupiter, has a young icy surface and strong evidence for a global subsurface ocean of liquid water beneath its ice shell.
Source: NASA Science · Public domain (US Government work)
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NASA
NASA (n.d.). Europa — NASA Solar System Exploration. NASA. https://science.nasa.gov/
@misc{cite:nasa-moon-europa,
title = {Europa — NASA Solar System Exploration},
organization = {NASA},
year = {n.d.},
url = {https://science.nasa.gov/},
note = {NASA overview of Europa.}
}How Europa connects across Asteria Star — scientific, cultural, and astrological links are kept separate.
Galileo Galilei was an Italian astronomer and physicist who pioneered telescopic astronomy, discovering the four largest moons of Jupiter.
Jupiter orbiter · NASA · launched 1989.
JUICE is ESA's mission to study Jupiter's icy moons Ganymede, Callisto, and Europa.
Europa Clipper will make dozens of flybys of Jupiter's moon Europa to assess its habitability.
In January 1610 Galileo saw four points of light beside Jupiter that changed position night after night — moons orbiting another world.
A region of Europa where the icy crust has broken into a jumble of tilted blocks 'rafts' set in refrozen slush — evidence that the surface interacts with the ocean below.
The icy moons with liquid-water oceans beneath their shells — Europa, Enceladus, and Titan — now the most promising places to search for life in the Solar System, targets of the Europa Clipper and Dragonfly missions.
The one requirement every known form of life shares — a liquid solvent for its chemistry. The habitable zone is defined by where a planet could hold liquid water on its surface, but subsurface oceans extend the possibilities far beyond it.
Life needs a source of energy to drive its chemistry — sunlight for photosynthesis, or chemical and thermal energy where the Sun cannot reach. Tidal heating warms the interiors of the icy moons, powering hydrothermal vents like those that may nourish life on Earth.
Earth organisms that thrive in extremes — searing vents, acid, salt, cold, and intense radiation — that once seemed impossible for life. They vastly widen where life might survive, and are the closest analogs for what an ocean-world biosphere might be.
A layer of liquid water beneath an icy shell, kept warm by tidal heating and in contact with a rocky seafloor. Europa and Enceladus have them; they are the leading places to look for life beyond Earth, and the target of the Europa Clipper mission.
The risk of carrying Earth microbes to another world on a spacecraft, which could harm any native biosphere or, worse, be mistaken for alien life. Missions to Mars and the ocean worlds are cleaned and sterilised to strict standards to prevent it.
A world with a large body of liquid water — most securely the global oceans hidden beneath the ice of moons like Europa and Enceladus, and possibly some water-rich exoplanets. Ocean worlds are among the most promising places to search for life beyond Earth.
Amalthea is a small, reddish inner moon of Jupiter orbiting closer to the planet than the Galilean moons.
Ariel is a moon of Uranus and the brightest of its major satellites.
Callisto is the outermost of the four Galilean moons of Jupiter and is heavily cratered.
Charon is the largest moon of the dwarf planet Pluto, roughly half Pluto's diameter.
Deimos is the smaller and outer of the two natural satellites of Mars.
Dione is an icy moon of Saturn marked by bright wispy fractures across its surface.
Facts on this topic will be cited from these primary and reference sources.
Mission data, planetary science, space telescopes, and public-domain imagery.
Most NASA-produced imagery is in the public domain; individual items are checked for usage terms before publication.
Orbital data, ephemerides, and small-body parameters for planets, asteroids, and comets.