The smallest of the four Galilean moons orbiting Jupiter, Europa, has been in NASA’s crosshairs since June 2016, when the agency asked a team of 21 scientists to design a lander specifically for a life-finding mission. The team had to come up with science objectives and figure out whether the mission would work or not, and it looks like their eight months of hard work paid off, as the complete report shows off a boxy spacecraft with spindly legs that could determine whether Europa was able to support life in the past, or if it actually supports it in the present. NASA believes that the moon’s icy crust shelters a global saltwater ocean that could be in contact with a rocky seafloor.
The silicate seafloor could potentially provide the required energy and elements in order to sustain life at a certain level, and since the only other ocean in contact with seafloor outside our own planet is the Enceladus moon orbiting Saturn, Europa definitely looks like a safer bet when it comes to exploring. The lander would also examine Europa’s non-ice materials in order to determine its habitability, but since the program is scheduled to launch sometime in the 2020s, we still have a bit of waiting time ahead of us.
