Saur is the project coordinator on Exo-Oceans, which is hoping to answer this question. ‘It’s very important to disentangle the effects that really come from the ocean.’ But these studies ‘have mostly neglected all the other effects that generate magnetic fields,’ said Professor Joachim Saur, a planetary scientist from the University of Cologne, Germany, such as thin atmospheres around the moons. One of our best approaches so far has been to look for the effects of salt in the oceans on their electrical conductivity by studying magnetic fields around the moons. But they are also trapped under tens of kilometres of ice, making studies of them very difficult. The oceans under these moons are likely large, spanning the entire moons’ circumferences and extending tens of kilometres deep. During this time, it will return invaluable data back to Earth.īefore it even gets there, however, scientists are already busy studying these moons for signs of habitability, and preparing for the data that will be returned by the mission. Scheduled for arrival by 2029, it will perform multiple flybys of Europa and Callisto before entering orbit around Ganymede from 2032-2034 – the first spacecraft to orbit a moon other than Earth’s moon. To help answer that question, the European Space Agency is planning to send a spacecraft to Jupiter in 2022, called the Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (JUICE). Now, new questions are being asked: if there is water on these moons, could there be life? And could we look for it? The other two large icy moons, Ganymede and Callisto, are also thought to have oceans beneath their surfaces. Since then, further studies have detected signs of water plumes possibly erupting from this ocean. Three of Jupiter’s four largest moons are icy, and in 1998 NASA’s Galileo spacecraft detected tantalising hints of an ocean beneath one, Europa.
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