Europa’s surface is made of water ice and so it reflects 5.5 times the sunlight than our Moon does. Europa orbits Jupiter at about 417,000 miles (671,000 kilometers) from the planet, which itself orbits the Sun at a distance of roughly 500 million miles (780 million kilometers), or 5.2 astronomical units (AU).

Abundant liquid water, energy, and the right chemical elements make Europa one of the best places in the solar system to seek present-day life beyond Earth.

2024年5月16日 · Europa is one of the largest of Jupiter’s more than 90 moons. It's the sixth-closest moon to the planet.

2025年1月9日 · Europa is one of the largest of Jupiter’s more than 90 moons. It's the sixth-closest moon to the planet.

2018年5月11日 · NASA will host a Science Chat May 14 about the latest analysis of Jupiter’s moon Europa and its status as a promising place in the solar system to search for life.

2025年1月9日 · By the next year, NASA’s Galileo mission revealed that Jupiter’s moon Europa likely has a global ocean that could be habitable. Since arriving at Saturn in 2004, Cassini showed that Europa isn’t an oddball: Potentially habitable ocean worlds exist even in the Saturn system -- 10 times farther from the sun than Earth.

2000年1月10日 · When NASA's Galileo spacecraft swooped past Jupiter's moon Europa a week ago, it picked up powerful new evidence that a liquid ocean lies beneath Europa's icy crust.

Cassini revealed the dramatic truth: Enceladus is an active moon that hides a global ocean of liquid salty water beneath its crust. What’s more, jets of icy particles from that ocean, laced with a brew of water and simple organic chemicals, gush out into space continuously from this fascinating ocean world.

2012年12月14日 · In this image we see a mosaic of ridges and craters on Europa (a moon of Jupiter). Image Credit: NASA/JPL I truly think that our solar system harbors life elsewhere―perhaps Mars or Europa, or Enceladus.

2025年1月9日 · The Europa Jupiter System Mission (EJSM) is guided by the overarching theme: the emergence of habitable worlds around gas giants, with goals to determine whether the Jupiter System harbors habitable worlds, and to characterize the processes within the Jupiter system.