How NASA Will Look for Geysers (and Life) on Europa
In recent years, scientists have suggested that images from the Hubble telescope show plumes of icy water spewing from the surface of Jupiter’s moon Europa. Others have doubted the claim—which is fair enough, because the images are kind of fuzzy and the satellite's instrument couldn’t always capture them. But intrigued by Hubble's images from 2014 and 2016, the University of Michigan’s Xianzhe Jia recently went back to the data taken by the Galileo spacecraft that flew past Europa in December 1997. Today, he and other scientists presented more evidence that the Jovian moon is spewing out big fountains of water from its icy surface. Now, the hope is that scientists can grab some of it and check for life—and in fact, NASA is already working on it. During a three-minute datastream during the 1997 flyby, Galileo’s plasma wave instrument showed unusual emissions of charged particles. An on-board magnetometer registered a shift in the magnetic field that envelopes Europa from near...