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The Hunt for Life on Europa Is About to Kick Up a Gear
NASA’s Europa Clipper mission is set for launch, finally revealing if this icy moon of Jupiter is habitable or not.
These tidal forces appear to have melted some of the ice below Europa’s frozen surface, giving it a suspected vast ocean that surrounds its entire core, first hinted at in magnetic field data collected by NASA’s Galileo spacecraft that orbited Jupiter from 1995 to 2003. That was until 2013, when the Hubble telescope discovered a plume ejecting from Europa, possibly a spout of water from the subsurface ocean seeping through the ice and firing into space, something that has been observed multiple times on Saturn’s icy moon Enceladus. Technicians inside the Payload Hazardous Servicing Facility at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida monitor movement and guide the agency’s largest planetary mission spacecraft, Europa Clipper, as a crane hoists it on a stand as part of prelaunch processing on Tuesday, May 28, 2024.
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