While NASA has plans to possibly send a lander to Europa in the coming years, a new discovery might make touchdown tricky – there’s a chance that large swathes of Europa’s surface are covered in ice spikes almost 50 ft (15 m) high.
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Europa is regarded as one of the most likely places in the solar system to find life, but where to look for evidence of it? To aid future space missions, a team has drawn up comprehensive maps of the radiation bombarding the moon to determine where explorers must look to find signs of life.
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One of the most promising places in the solar system to search for life is Jupiter’s moon, Europa, an icy world with a slushy, salty, subsurface ocean. Old data has turned up new evidence of water plumes spraying through the icy shell into space.
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New types of bacteria have been found in one of the most alien environments on Earth: a subglacial lake buried beneath almost a thousand feet of ice. Conditions could be strikingly similar to oceans of Europa or Enceladus, so studying these organisms could aid the search for extraterrestrial life.
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When scientists look for extraterrestrial life, they typically turn their focus upwards, to planets like Mars, moons like Enceladus and exoplanets beyond our own solar system. But for Lara Rowe, an assistant professor of chemistry at Valparaiso University in Indiana, the search begins in the lab.
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A new NASA report says that the Cassini probe has found evidence that hydrogen exists on Enceladus. The finding adds to the idea that the moon might harbor life in its subsurface ocean, as microbes could feed on the gas. Plus, Hubble has spied a plume on Europa for the second time.
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NASA has outlined a mission plan for placing a lander on Jupiter's moon Europa, what such a conceptual mission would look like, and how it would directly seek out life for the first time since the Viking Mars missions of the 1970s.
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New evidence revealed by NASA today suggests Europa might offer us a helping hand when it comes to studying its presumed subsurface ocean, by ejecting water plumes out into space and spraying its surface with more easily sampled material in the process.
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NASA is in the process of conceptualizing a future mission to explore Jupiter's moon Europa, and has now confirmed which scientific instruments it will send along to do the job.
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The NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts NIAC program has announced 15 phase I winners in its quest to make science fiction science fact.
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