Are there aliens on europa

There may well be life-hosting lakes suspended within the ice shell that such tech could access, but the ocean would be the main target. Related: Photos: Europa, mysterious icy moon of Jupiter. These teams are working on penetrator designs or other aspects of the larger system.

Johns Hopkins' proposal, for example, centers on penetrator-lander communications strategies. There are other potential difficulties as well. For instance, communications between the drill and lander might be tough to do via a tether once the drill gets deep enough down.

Europa's ice shell is a dynamic environment — many researchers think a form of ice-based plate tectonics is active there — so a miles-long tether may well get sheared or snapped. Researchers are therefore investigating the possibility of deploying puck-like modems behind the drill as it descends, Tom Cwik of JPL noted in an AGU presentation.

Furthermore, sterilizing the penetrator and ocean-exploring robot will be of prime importance, to minimize the chances that the mission contaminates a habitable — and possibly inhabited — environment with microbes from Earth. And such sterilization will be tough to achieve, given the complexity of the hardware.

Tough, but not impossible, Klonicki stressed; this aspect of the concept mission is not a showstopper, she said. Howell said that most of the important required penetrator technologies probably won't be ready to fly for at least another 10 to 15 years.

That would make the late s a realistic launch target for a Europa ocean mission, should NASA decide to develop one, Klonicki said. And there are reasons to be optimistic in this regard, she added, citing the selection of the Dragonfly drone mission to Saturn's huge moon Titan as evidence of the agency's willingness to take risks.

Titan also appears to harbor a buried ocean of liquid water, by the way. The huge moon sports hydrocarbon seas on its surface as well. And the risks inherent to a Europa ocean mission would definitely be worth taking, Howell said, describing such a project as "almost an obligation.

Related: 6 most likely places for alien life in the solar system. Some of these exploration strategies could be employed at Enceladus as well, though the Saturn moon's ocean may be significantly more accessible than that of Europa. A number of big "tiger stripe" fissures score Enceladus' south polar region, and dozens of geysers blast water ice, organic molecules and other material into space from these cracks. These geysers are powerful and prolific; the plume they create makes up Saturn's E ring.

Europa is constantly squeezed and stretched by the competing gravitational fields of Jupiter and the other Galilean moons , a process known as tidal flexing. The moon is believed to be a geologically active world, like the Earth, because the strong tidal flexing heats its rocky, metallic interior and keeps it partially molten. The surface of Europa is a vast expanse of water ice. Many scientists think that beneath the frozen surface is a layer of liquid water — a global ocean — which is prevented from freezing by the heat from flexing and which maybe over km deep.

Evidence for this ocean includes geysers erupting through cracks in the surface ice , a weak magnetic field and chaotic terrain on the surface, which could have been deformed by ocean currents swirling beneath. At the bottom of this ocean world it is conceivable that we might find hydrothermal vents and ocean floor volcanoes. On Earth, such features often support very rich and diverse ecosystems.

Read more: Europa: there may be life on Jupiter's moon and two new missions will pave the way for finding it. Like Europa, Enceladus is an ice-covered moon with a subsurface ocean of liquid water. They are clear evidence of an underground store of liquid water. This is very strong evidence for the existence of hydrothermal vents on the ocean floor, providing the chemistry needed for life and localised sources of energy.

Titan is the largest moon of Saturn and the only moon in the solar system with a substantial atmosphere. Distance from Jupiter also determines how much tidal heating the Galilean satellites experience — Io, closest to Jupiter, is heated so much that it is the most volcanically active body in the solar system, and it likely long ago drove off any water it had when it formed. Europa has a layer of ice and water on top of a rocky and metal interior, while Ganymede and Callisto actually have higher proportions of water ice and so lower densities.

Like our planet, Europa is thought to have an iron core, a rocky mantle, and an ocean of salty water. While evidence for an internal ocean is strong, its presence awaits confirmation by a future mission. All along Europa's many fractures, and in splotchy patterns across its surface, is a reddish-brown material whose composition is not known for certain, but likely contains salts and sulfur compounds that have been mixed with the water ice and modified by radiation.

This surface composition may hold clues to the moon's potential as a habitable world. Some of these fractures have built up into ridges hundreds of meters tall, while others appear to have pulled apart into wide bands of multiple parallel fractures. Galileo also found regions called "chaos terrain," where broken, blocky landscapes were covered in mysterious reddish material. In , scientists studying Galileo data proposed that chaos terrains could be places where the surface collapsed above lens-shaped lakes embedded within the ice.

Europa has only a tenuous atmosphere of oxygen, but in , NASA announced that researchers using the Hubble Space Telescope found evidence that Europa might be actively venting water into space.

This would mean the moon is geologically active in the present day. One of the most important measurements made by the Galileo mission showed how Jupiter's magnetic field was disrupted in the space around Europa.

The measurement strongly implied that a special type of magnetic field is being created induced within Europa by a deep layer of some electrically conductive fluid beneath the surface.

Based on Europa's icy composition, scientists think the most likely material to create this magnetic signature is a global ocean of salty water, and this magnetic field result is still the best evidence we have for the existence of an ocean on Europa. Resource Packages. A 3D model of Jupiter's moon Europa, an icy moon with a hidden subsurface ocean.

A 3D model of Europa Clipper, a future mission to Jupiter's ocean moon. The next full Moon is the Beaver Moon, and there will be a near-total lunar eclipse. Full Moon Guide: November - December Mocha Swirls in Jupiter's Turbulent Atmosphere. This page showcases our resources for those interested in learning more about Jupiter.