“You need a source of energy, you need liquid water, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorous and sulphur,” says Coates. “It will compare all three moons, look at the habitability of all three and the formation processes.” By “habitability”, he means the right conditions to find life. “It’s a fabulous mission,” says Andrew Coates from University College London, one of the lead scientists on the project. After it arrives in 2030, it will spend at least three years studying the Jovian system, flying past the planet and its icy moons and ultimately ending up in orbit around the massive Ganymede, the largest moon in the Solar System. The probe will set off for Jupiter in 2022. Juice, rather tenuously, stands for JUpiter ICy moons Explorer – an acronym that, I am told by a reliable source, was arrived at after quite a few late-night drinks.
This intriguing possibility has led to the development of a new internationally supported mission to Jupiter’s Moons, Juice, being put together by the European Space Agency. And where there is water, you have the potential for life.
Does io moon have water cracked#
But beneath the vast cracked pancakes of ice on Ganymede and Europa, there are oceans of water. Io is a fiery world of volcanoes, molten lava and billowing clouds of toxic sulphur Callisto, an ancient pockmarked body covered in a crust of icy rock. Jupiter has just under 70 documented moons, the four largest of which are the Galilean moons Io, Callisto, Ganymede and Europa. There, in the shadow of the bloated stripy gasbag Jupiter, could be actual living organisms – not the desiccated and irradiated remnants of long dead microbes that scientists hope to find on the red planet. But for our best chance of finding life elsewhere in the Solar System, we may need to look beyond the dusty plains, vast mountains and deep canyons of Mars, and travel past the scattered cosmic debris of the asteroid belt. Opportunity, the older (and smaller) rover cousin of Curiosity made the headlines last week when it discovered more conditions that could have supported life on Mars in its past.
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