Lakes of Jupiter’s moon Europa could host life, say scientists
Posted Nov. 16, 2011, at 7:47 p.m.  For explorers searching for
life beyond Earth, the siren song of Europa, Jupiter’s icy moon,
trills sweetly.  “Europa has the best chance of having life
there today,” said Britney Schmidt, who studies the moon at the
University of Texas at Austin. Astrobiologists think so because
NASA’s Galileo probe found strong evidence for a deep, briny
ocean covering the entire moon deep under the icy surface.  A
theory published by Schmidt and colleagues Wednesday in the
journal Nature is sure to raise the volume of the siren call.
The scientists suspect liquid lakes lurk just under the moon’s
cracked and mottled surface.  The lakes themselves could provide
a second habitat for life, said Don Blankenship, a geophysicist
and Europa specialist also at the University of Texas.  More
intriguingly, such lakes would also provide channels for organic
compounds on Europa’s surface to be drawn into the deep ocean.
Without that mate