Key facts about Europa
05-01-2025
12:56 PM
1 min read
Overview:
The icy crust on Jupiter’s moon Europa is much thicker than scientists had thought, which could quash the hope of finding the ingredients for life in the salty oceans beneath its surface.
About Europa:
- It is the smallest and second nearest of the four large moons (Galilean satellites) discovered around Jupiter by the Italian astronomer Galileo in 1610.
- Europa is a rocky object covered with an extremely smooth, elaborately patterned surface of ice.
- Europa has a diameter of 3,130 km (1,940 miles), which makes it a little smaller than Earth’s Moon.
- Europa may be one of the most promising places in our solar system to find present-day environments suitable for some form of life beyond Earth.
- Scientists believe a saltwater ocean lies beneath its icy shell, holding twice as much water as Earth's global ocean.
- It also may have the chemical elements that are key ingredients to life.
- Europa was first observed at close range in 1979 by the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft and then by the Galileo orbiter beginning in the mid-1990s.
- NASA launched Europa Clipper on Oct. 14, 2024, to determine whether there are places below Europa's surface that could support life.
Q1: What is a satellite?
It is anything that orbits a planet or a star. Earth is a satellite orbiting the Sun. The Moon is a satellite orbiting Earth. When you launch a spacecraft into orbit around Earth, that’s a satellite, too.
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