NASA launches search for aliens: will life be found on Europa?
On Monday, a spacecraft leaves Florida on a hunt for signs of extraterrestrial life. The destination? Europa! No not the continent, but a very mysterious moon orbiting the distant planet Jupiter and bearing the same name. Indeed, beneath its icy surface could be hiding a huge ocean with twice as much water as on Earth. And life could be hidden there!
Europa is a whopping 628 million kilometers from Earth and just slightly larger than our moon. The Europa Clipper spacecraft is following a European mission that left last year, but using a cosmic gliding technique, it will overtake it and arrive first. But that won't be for right away; the spacecraft won't reach Europe until 2030. However, the discoveries from this mission are already being eagerly awaited as they could change our knowledge about life in our solar system forever.
“If we discover life at such a great distance from the sun, it would mean that life came from a source other than Earth,” Mark Fox-Powell, planetary microbiologist at the Open University told BBC News. “That's hugely important, because if that happens twice in our solar system, it could mean that life is very common,” he says.
(SR for Tagtik/Source: BBC News/Picture: Unsplash)