After analyzing photographs, the USA space agency is expected to release details Monday about the suspected subsurface ocean on Jupiter’s moon Europa.
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Scientists believe that Europa might contain life beneath the ice sheets and new findings will be presented in the conference.
Of course, NASA could be lying.
NASA’s planet-hunting telescope Hubble has discovered something major on Jupiter’s mysterious moon Europa – regarded as the solar system’s best bet for alien life.
Speaking at the event will be Paul Hertz, director of the Astrophysics Division, William Sparks, an astronomer with the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Britney Schmidt, assistant professor at the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta and Jennifer Wiseman, senior Hubble project scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Centre in Greenbelt, Maryland. The ocean also fascinates scientists because they believe it may be in contact with Europa’s rocky mantle – circumstances that could lead to all kinds of chemical reactions. That mission will perform 45 flybys of the moon at varying altitudes from 16 miles above the surface to 1,700 miles above the surface.
Back in 2012, Hubble used a special (yet very low-resolution) instrument called a spectrograph to sniff out normally invisible plumes of water vapor, shown as blue pixels above the moon. The presence of a subsurface ocean would definitely move Europa to the top of the list of potential candidates for the presence of such life, however. The combination of that warm center and the super thick ice crust at the top, which keeps out the coldness of space, could allow any liquid water between to stay at a life-supporting temperature.
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‘If those plumes are connected with the subsurface water ocean we are confident exists under Europa’s crust, then this means that future investigations can directly investigate the chemical makeup of Europa’s potentially habitable environment without drilling through layers of ice.
