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Europa is one of the largest moons of Jupiter, and we believe that Europa has
a subsurface ocean tens to hundreds of kilometers thick
And so this ocean may be one of the best places to search for life in the Solar System.
There’s been three space missions that have provided evidence for
Europa harboring liquid water.
The first one is Voyager in the late 70's, the second one is the Galileo mission
in the late 90's, and most recently Hubble, which detected plume-like emission
from hydrogen and oxygen which is closely related to the existence of water
beneath its surface.
These plumes may be directly ejected through cracks in the surface of the moon,
and therefore what we are seeing in water vapor plumes
is the actual ocean water from the subsurface of the moon.
As these plume particles are ejected to space, solar radiation is going to excite these
water particles, creating vibrational modes. Now, these vibrational modes are signatures
that can be detected at infrared wavelengths by the Keck Observatory.
So, we observe Europa on seventeen dates. What we found is that the majority
of observations have no presence of water; however, on one of those dates
we detected water. We detected H2O.
In the past, Hubble provided indirect measurements of water by detecting hydrogen and oxygen,
but now we have directly detected water for the first time.
Both the Webb Telescope and the Europa Clipper mission will give us
us a much more detailed picture of the surface of Europa, its cracks and crevices,
detailed pictures of the water vapor, as well as other molecules that may also
be emanating from the subsurface of Europa.
So both of these missions will give us a great picture of whether Europa is truly habitable.
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