Which jupiter moon has water

Europa has a layer of ice and water on top of a rocky and metal interior, while Ganymede and Callisto actually have higher proportions of water ice and so lower densities. Like our planet, Europa is thought to have an iron core, a rocky mantle, and an ocean of salty water. While evidence for an internal ocean is strong, its presence awaits confirmation by a future mission.

All along Europa's many fractures, and in splotchy patterns across its surface, is a reddish-brown material whose composition is not known for certain, but likely contains salts and sulfur compounds that have been mixed with the water ice and modified by radiation.

This surface composition may hold clues to the moon's potential as a habitable world. Some of these fractures have built up into ridges hundreds of meters tall, while others appear to have pulled apart into wide bands of multiple parallel fractures.

Galileo also found regions called "chaos terrain," where broken, blocky landscapes were covered in mysterious reddish material. In , scientists studying Galileo data proposed that chaos terrains could be places where the surface collapsed above lens-shaped lakes embedded within the ice.

Europa has only a tenuous atmosphere of oxygen, but in , NASA announced that researchers using the Hubble Space Telescope found evidence that Europa might be actively venting water into space. This would mean the moon is geologically active in the present day. One of the most important measurements made by the Galileo mission showed how Jupiter's magnetic field was disrupted in the space around Europa.

The measurement strongly implied that a special type of magnetic field is being created induced within Europa by a deep layer of some electrically conductive fluid beneath the surface. Based on Europa's icy composition, scientists think the most likely material to create this magnetic signature is a global ocean of salty water, and this magnetic field result is still the best evidence we have for the existence of an ocean on Europa. Resource Packages.

A 3D model of Jupiter's moon Europa, an icy moon with a hidden subsurface ocean. A 3D model of Europa Clipper, a future mission to Jupiter's ocean moon. Mocha Swirls in Jupiter's Turbulent Atmosphere. This page showcases our resources for those interested in learning more about Jupiter. Jupiter Resources. This page showcases our resources for those interested in learning more about ocean worlds.

Ocean Worlds Resources. The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope RST and ground-based observatories will join Webb before the decade is over and use their cutting-edge instruments and optics to characterize the exoplanet atmospheres and climates.

These studies will have significant implications, and not just for our understanding of the kinds of potentially habitable environments that exist in our Solar System. They will also help with the search for life in other star systems, which could also be locked away beneath the icy surfaces of exomoons. Skip to content.

Illustration of Europa, showing plume activity connects the surface to the interior ocean. Hubble had previously detected water vapor on Europa — in apparent plumes that arise sporadically and temporarily extend perhaps miles kilometers into space from the moon's icy shell, which overlies a huge, buried ocean of liquid water. But this new finding is something quite different.

Related: Photos: Europa, mysterious icy moon of Jupiter. This analysis revealed the existence of significant amounts of water vapor on Europa's trailing hemisphere — the one that faces away from the moon's orbital path around Jupiter. This water vapor persisted over the long haul, unlike the transient plumes, Roth reported in a study that was published last month in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

Roth and colleagues recently used a similar technique to spot water vapor on fellow Jupiter satellite Ganymede , the largest moon in the solar system.