Space photos of the week: Europe! Try not to land there

If you're looking for life in the solar system, maybe start with the icy moons. One of the most likely to harbor life is Jupiter's third Galilean satellite, Europa. Hidden beneath its thick crust of ice is thought to be a huge inner ocean, containing more water than all of Earth combined. It's salty too. (We know this because when NASA sent its Galileo spacecraft to Jupiter in the 1990s, the magnetometer aboard the spacecraft found something conducting electricity on Europa. And what a good electrical conductor? Salt.) But Europa is also unique in that its surface is covered in what is known as the "terrain of chaos". These strange patterns are thought to be created by a variety of processes, the main one being what is called tidal warming or tidal bending. All the planets and their moons experience this (thanks to our moon for the tides), but Jupiter is so huge that it really pushes and pulls its moons as they orbit around it, and that creates friction. And this friction creates heat, causing the surface to expand and crack. Then, when it is in other positions relative to the planet, the moon cools and the surface contracts again and freezes in place. Over billions of years, this process has created a moon covered in what look like puzzle pieces. Europa also has plumes (water eruptions from deep within the planet), or so we think, and this possible mixing of water and melting ice could also alter the appearance of the surface.

Where we find water on Earth, we also tend to find life, and scientists think the same could be true for Europa: NASA's Clipper Mission is to be launched in 2024 with the sole purpose of exploring the habitability of this beautiful world of ice.

This week we will sit atop the Galileo spacecraft and dive above the surface of Europa. Thanks to newly processed images from this mission, we're going to see this moon in more detail than ever before. Europe, don't try to land there! No, here we go. Hang on!

The puzzling and fascinating surface of Jupiter's icy moon Europa features prominently in this newly reprocessed color view, made from images taken by NASA's Galileo spacecraft in the late 1990s.NASA/JPL -Caltech/SETI Institute