The gravitational interaction of the icy moons with Jupiter provides energy in the form of heat. Yet, its icy moons potentially have liquid water oceans, and one of the reasons is Jupiter’s gravity. But beyond investigating them individually, the mission will also focus on their collaborative complex behavior. JUICE will spend at least three years performing a series of flybys around Jupiter and its Galilean moons. Galilean super moons, a collaborative system Still, the right chemistry and stability are needed for life to emerge. If there is liquid water, there are temperature conditions for life. The ingredients of such life forms are liquid water, stable environments, the right organic chemistry, and some form of energy. In the solar system, searching for life as we know it makes sense. Miriam Rengel, astrophysics at the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research. However, JUICE has instruments powerful enough to investigate the conditions for emergency of life,” clarifies Dr. “We won’t investigate the presence of life directly, because for that we would probably need a spacecraft that lands on the moons’ surface -such as the Huygens probe that actually landed on Titan- or even an ocean-explorer. ESA’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer, Juice, being unpacked from its shipping container in the Hydra clean room at ESA’s European Space Research and Technology Centre, ESTEC in the Netherlands on 30 April 2020. It will search for evidence of those interior oceans and their chemistry, characterizing the conditions that may have led to the emergence of habitable environments, as well as the diversity of processes in the Jovian system. The European probe will focus on Jupiter and its Galilean-icy moons: Ganymede, Europa, and Callisto. These and other fascinating findings and other habitable conditions, such as Ganymede’s magnetosphere, motivate scientists from the European Space Agency to kick off the largest and most powerful mission to the Jovian system: Jupiter ICy moons Explorer (JUICE). Moreover, these observations revealed the presence of water vapor in Ganymede’s atmosphere and spectacular plumes, presumably of water coming out of the bowels of Europa. Observations from the Hubble Space Telescope and NASA’s Galileo probe indicate that Ganymede, Europa, and Callisto may host great oceans of salty liquid water, each containing more water than all the Earth’s oceans combined. Ganymede, Europa, and Callisto surfaces are characterized by thick ice crusts. More than 400 years later, astronomers have gathered sufficient evidence to consider Ganymede and Europa great candidates to host life. When Galileo Galilei discovered four Jupiter’s moons, he probably didn’t think he looked at entire habitable worlds. This may sound like science fiction, but this could be happening right now -not in a far, far away galaxy, but in our own solar system. Imagine extraterrestrial micro monsters swimming, growing, and reproducing in an immense ocean of liquid water, trapped under an ice crust.
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