From the moon to Mars, scientists have been looking for water— the key to life— in the solar system for decades. Recently, they have turned to Jupiter (木星)!
On April 14, the European Space Agency's (ESA) JUlCE spacecraft successfully lifted off from French Guiana in South America, JUICE, short for "Jupiter lcy Moons Explorer", will collect data from Jupiter and its three moons, Europa, Ganymede and Calisto.
The three moons are believed to have big oceans of liquid water under their icy shells. According to ESA, the water on these moons could be as much as six times the amount in Earth's oceans. The mission"will change our understanding of the solar system"，wrote Scientific American.
In 1998, NASA's Galileo spacecraft found that Europa might send water as far as 160 kilometers into space. That gave scientists the idea of studying the icy moons of Jupiter.
The oceans under these moons are likely to be tens of kilometers deep. But they are also trapped under tens of kilometers of ice, making it very difficult to study them, Although JUICE cannot land on the surface. It has lots of high-tech equipment to study the moon's environment, including spectral imaging (光谱成像) tools and radar. They could give more data on things like the thickness of the oceans, their salt content and their distance from the icy shells above, reported Phys. org.
"The main goal is to understand whether there are habitable (可居住的) environments among those icy moons and around a giant planet like Jupiter," JUICE team member Olivier Witasse said during a press conference on April 6.
