Area Images of the Week: Europa! Try No Landing There

If you are looking for life in the solar system, possibly begin with the icy moons. One of the most likely to harbor life is Jupiter’s third Galilean satellite, Europa. Hidden beneath its thick crust of ice is believed to be a massive interior ocean, consisting of more water than all of Earth combined. It’s salty too. (We know this since when NASA sent its Galileo spacecraft to Jupiter in the 1990 s, the magnetometer on board the spacecraft found something carrying out electrical energy on Europa. And what is a great electrical conductor? Salt.) However Europa is also unique because its surface area is covered in what is called “chaos surface.” These odd patterns are believed to be produced by a range of procedures, the primary one being something called tidal heating or tidal flexing. All worlds and their moons experience this, (thanks to our moon for the tides), however Jupiter is so big that it truly presses and pulls its moons as they orbit around, and that produces friction. And that friction produces heat, triggering the surface to expand and crack. When it’s in other positions with regard to the world, the moon cools back down and the surface area agreements once again and freezes in location. Over billions of years this procedure has actually developed a moon covered in what looks like jigsaw pieces. Europa also has plumes (eruptions of water from deep inside the world), approximately we believe, and this possible churning of