Europa

While NASA’s Juno spacecraft has captured some stunning imagery and compelling data on Jupiter since entering orbit around the gas giant in 2016, it’s not the only celestial body in the probe’s sights, now revealing more about its moon, Europa.

James Webb Space Telescope's historic first images showed a galaxy cluster billions of light-years away, but now it’s turned its sights on something much closer to home. NASA has released infrared images of Jupiter used to test Webb's instruments.

Subsurface oceans on moons are some of the most promising places to look for life beyond Earth. NASA is now funding a project to develop a swarm of small swimming robots that would explore these alien oceans for signs of extraterrestrial life.

Jupiter’s Icy moon Europa – which is considered one of the most promising places to find life beyond Earth – may have enough internal heat to trigger volcanic activity on the seafloor of its global ocean, according to the results of a new study.

Jupiter’s moon Europa is a fascinating world, with a global subsurface ocean encased in an icy shell and plumes of water that vent into space. A new study has simulated how these plumes might originate, revealing a surprisingly dynamic ice ball.

Giving a new meaning to the word "moonshine," NASA scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, have concluded that Jupiter's moon Europa glows in the dark due to being constantly bombarded with high-energy radiation.

Jupiter’s moon Europa is increasingly seen as one of the more likely bodies to harbor life in our solar system. Scientists at NASA have now directly confirmed water vapor in its atmosphere for the very first time.

NASA has given the official go-ahead for the Europa Clipper deep-space mission to make a detailed survey of one of Jupiter's largest moons. The unmanned mission can now proceed to its final design phase ahead of the building and testing of the spacecraft and its instruments.

A new study by Caltech and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California indicate that the subterranean world ocean on Jupiter's moon Europa may be more Earthlike than scientists believed, with the waters containing common salt.

A key element of NASA's Europa Clipper is being put through its paces as a prototype of the probe's High-Gain Antenna (HGA) undergoes testing at the Experimental Test Range (ETR). The HGA will be used to keep the Clipper in contact as it conducts a series of flybys of Jupiter's moon Europa.

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.

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.