Europa’s surface may be covered by blades of ice

Discovery : As NASA plans a potential mission to Europa, one of Jupiter’s moons, scientists involved in the project are looking at exotic landscapes here on Earth to better prepare for the conditions such a mission may encounter. The proposed Europa Clipper , which would launch in November 2021, would conduct repeated flybys of the icy moon to study its composition and try to determine whether life could exist there. Although numerous images of Europa have been captured, their resolution is not fine enough yet to accurately determine what its surface is like. Daniel Hobley of the University of Colorado Boulder and colleagues have proposed one likely scenario based on an unusual phenomenon found in high latitudes on Earth: fields of sharp spikes of ice called penitentes . The icy blades have been seen in the mountains of Chile and occur only near Earth’s equator, where the Sun’s rays shine straight down throughout the year, cutting the ice into jagged spikes. Temperature maps of Europa and radar signals bounced off its surface back up that theory: There appears to be a band of unusually cold surface and poor radar reflection centered around the moon’s equator.