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Large Body Of Water Found On Jupiter’s Moon Europa

Scientists from The University of Texas at Austin said they have discovered a body of liquid water the volume of the North American Great Lakes inside one of Jupiter’s moons.

The team said that the water could represent a potential habitat for life, and many more lakes might exist throughout the shallow regions of Europa’s shell.

The lake is covered by floating ice shelves that appear to be collapsing, which could provide a mechanism for transferring nutrients and energy between the surface and a vast ocean already inferred to exist below the thick ice shell.

“One opinion in the scientific community has been, ‘If the ice shell is thick, that’s bad for biology — that it might mean the surface isn’t communicating with the underlying ocean,’ ” lead author Britney Schmidt, a postdoctoral fellow at The University of Texas, said in a press release. “Now we see evidence that even though the ice shell is thick, it can mix vigorously. That could make Europa and its ocean more habitable.”

The scientists focused on Galileo spacecraft images of two circular, bumpy features on Europa’s surface known as chaos terrains.

The only true confirmation of the inferred lakes would come from a future spacecraft mission designed to probe the ice shell.  A mission like this was rated as the second-highest priority flagship mission by the National Research Council’s recent Planetary Decadal Survey.

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