Pack your ice gear – we're going to Europa. NASA's budget request for 2016 includes $30 million for a dedicated mission to Jupiter's icy moon, which is considered one of the best prospects for discovering life in our solar system.
Europa has been a tempting destination for planetary scientists since the mid-1990s, when the Galileo orbiter revealed that it may harbour a deep ocean of briny liquid water beneath a thick icy shell. More recently, reports that plumes of subsurface water could be venting into space sparked calls for a mission to sample that water directly and see if anything lives in it.
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