Hunters of extraterrestrial life have dreamed for nearly 50 years of Europa, this ice-covered moon of Jupiter. Their dreams will take the form of a NASA space probe, Europa Clippercapable of detecting, they hope, indirect traces of bacteria there.
This will be the second mission of its kind, since a European probe, Juice (Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer) has been on the way since 2023, and is expected to arrive in 2031.
Photos of the probes Pioneer, Voyager et Galileo which had succeeded one another in the area since the 1970s showed nothing encouraging: a grayish surface dotted with cracks.
Ice surface
The fact that this surface is ice and not rock, however, constitutes the heart of the enigma.
The crevasses, as well as the apparent absence of meteorite craters, betray that this “layer” of ice – several tens of kilometers thick – is not immobile. It moves and, in doing so, cracks randomly — as you would expect if it were resting on a “layer” of water.
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