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Moons

Space

What are the prospects for life on the icy moons Europa and Enceladus?

As far as we know, there are three main ingredients required for life: liquid water, an energy source and complex chemistry. Do Europa or Enceladus have them all?

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Europa, one of Jupiter's moons and Enceladus, one of Saturn's

Space

Fissures on ocean moons may be too rare to provide conditions for life

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Planet Saturn in deep space with major moons according to scale (Elements of planet texture for 3d render furnished by NASA

Space

Saturn’s rings could have come from a destroyed moon named Chrysalis

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Original Caption Released with Image: The puzzling, fascinating surface of Jupiter's icy moon Europa looms large in this newly-reprocessed color view, made from images taken by NASA's Galileo spacecraft in the late 1990s. This is the color view of Europa from Galileo that shows the largest portion of the moon's surface at the highest resolution. The view was previously released as a mosaic with lower resolution and strongly enhanced color (see PIA02590). To create this new version, the images were assembled into a realistic color view of the surface that approximates how Europa would appear to the human eye. The scene shows the stunning diversity of Europa's surface geology. Long, linear cracks and ridges crisscross the surface, interrupted by regions of disrupted terrain where the surface ice crust has been broken up and re-frozen into new patterns. Color variations across the surface are associated with differences in geologic feature type and location. For example, areas that appear blue or white contain relatively pure water ice, while reddish and brownish areas include non-ice components in higher concentrations. The polar regions, visible at the left and right of this view, are noticeably bluer than the more equatorial latitudes, which look more white. This color variation is thought to be due to differences in ice grain size in the two locations. Images taken through near-infrared, green and violet filters have been combined to produce this view. The images have been corrected for light scattered outside of the image, to provide a color correction that is calibrated by wavelength. Gaps in the images have been filled with simulated color based on the color of nearby surface areas with similar terrain types. This global color view consists of images acquired by the Galileo Solid-State Imaging (SSI) experiment on the spacecraft's first and fourteenth orbits through the Jupiter system, in 1995 and 1998, respectively. Image scale is 1 mile (1.6 kilometers) per pixel. North on Europa is at right. The Galileo mission was managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, for the agency's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. JPL is a division of the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena. Additional information about Galileo and its discoveries is available on the Galileo mission home page at http://solarsystem.nasa.gov/galileo/. More information about Europa is available at http://solarsystem.nasa.gov/europa. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SETI Institute

Space

Shards of pure ice might snow upwards beneath the ice shell of Europa

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Earth could theoretically host two more moons the same size as the current moon. If the extra moons were smaller, it could have even more.

Space

Physicists work out how many moons Earth could have

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Enceladus

Space

Enceladus’s oceans may be the right saltiness to sustain life

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This high resolution image of the icy crust of Europa, one of Jupiter's moons, reveals a surface criss-crossed by multiple sets of ridges and fractures

Space

We now know how the mysterious ridges covering Europa’s surface formed

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exoplanet

Space

Moons might not form around rocky planets much larger than Earth

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Space

Leigh Fletcher interview: Why we urgently need a mission to Neptune

Features
Depiction of a moon orbiting a Jupiter-like exoplanet

Space

Astronomers may have found a huge moon around a Jupiter-like exoplanet

A confident detection of a moon orbiting a planet beyond our solar system – called an exomoon – has eluded astronomers so far, but they have found a new candidate

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Space

Saturn’s small moon Mimas may be hiding an impossible ocean

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Space

The biggest moons of Uranus may have oceans beneath their icy shells

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Space

A fragment of our moon may be orbiting the sun with Earth

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Space

Astronomers may have found a moon orbiting a rogue planet with no star

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