Browsing: moon

Science Illustration of Europa (foreground), Jupiter (right) and Io (middle)
A Window into Europa’s Ocean Right at the Surface

If you could lick the surface of Jupiter’s icy moon Europa, you would actually be sampling a bit of the ocean beneath. A new paper by Mike Brown, an astronomer at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Calif., and Kevin Hand from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, also in Pasadena, details the strongest evidence yet that salty water from the vast liquid ocean beneath Europa’s frozen exterior actually makes its way to the surface.

Science Moon
How the Moon Got it’s Water

The discovery of water on the moon made headlines in 2009, and a study published in the journal Nature Geoscience last week suggests that this water may have come, at least in part, from the sun.