When Galileo took a closer look at Europa, the picture changed.

 

Europa is a fascinating object. If you imagine descending onto a world that looks every place like the frozen ways of the Arctic and the Antarctic, you’ll get a pretty good impression of what’s going on. It’s very, very bright because the ice is very reflective, and broken up in places where it looks like you have/ basically icy rafts on the surface. It would be like flying over a moon-sized ice field, basically. And landing on the surface you would not see anylarge mountains, you would see crisscrossing ridges that would look like killer ski-slopes every place.

 

Killer ski-slopes with pale pink stripes and all with the icy surface at a very cool 260 degrees Fahrenheit below zero.

 

It’s a… the ice is so cold. It’s… it did not just really, really hard like…

 

Yeah yeah yeah. It… that’s just like rocks. So it’s… it’s as hard as rock at the surface of Europa.

 

No doubt, the first person to return from the ski-slopes of Europa will have some pretty tall stories to tell. Europa specialist, NASA’s Bob Pappalardo would like to be one of them.

 

Oh, I love to get down on the surface of Europa. To walk around that surface would be probably a kind of crunching to your bone. It’s a very bizarre place and really stretches our minds to think about what’s possible in an ice world that’s orbiting a giant planet, like Jupiter.

 

Europa itself is stretched by the gravitational strain of being locked in an orbit with Io and Ganymede around its giant host.

 

Every Europan day as it orbits Jupiter, the stresses rotate around. And if a crack forms, moving at just the right speed across Europa’s surface about the speed / a person can walk, it would follow a curved path and explain the pattern that we see on the surface. You’d be able to hear the cracking, probably, of Europa’s ice shell. You couldn’t hear that if your head were in space. But as soon as you put your head to the ice, you probably hear Europa creaking like a boat.