The Deep Impact mission, which last year fired a massive projectile at the nucleus of comet Tempel 1, has inspired a proposal for a similar mission to Jupiter’s moon Europa.
Evidence that Europa has a subsurface ocean, which would make it the only known “water world” besides Earth, emerged between 1996 and 2003 from NASA’s Galileo mission. While this makes Europa a prime target in the search for alien life, any plan to reach its ocean faces the daunting challenge of how to drill or melt down through the 20 kilometres or more of ice lying above it.
To begin…
