The buried ocean of Europa may not require drilling if NewScientist‘s report (7 November 2015, paywall) is accurate:
Observations from the Galileo spacecraft, which visited the Jupiter system in the 1990s, found that the moon hosts an ocean covered in water ice. Sulphur and oxygen from volcanoes on the nearby moon Io also fall onto Europa’s surface, where they combine to make magnesium sulphate. Now a new analysis has found an unidentified material that only shows up in fractured terrain. This could mean the buried ocean is breaching the surface.
The spectrum, or chemical signature, of the material has so far defied identification. “It looks like the spectrum of water ice except that it’s distorted,” says Patrick Fischer at the California Institute of Technology. The team hasn’t been able to reproduce it using a library of known chemicals – although they can rule out sulphates, which researchers expected to see.
One possibility is an unknown blend of potassium or sodium chloride. This would mean these regions are salt flats left behind when ocean water burbled up and then evaporated (Astronomical Journal, in press). “We can guess that the spectrum we’re seeing is probably evaporate deposits of salt left over from the ocean,” Fischer says.
Just land and scoop. And take off. And fly back.
OK, not that easy.
