Unmasking Europa: The Search for Life on Jupiter's Ocean Moon [Paperback]

Jupiter's ice moon Europa is widely regarded as the most likely place to find extraterrestrial life. This book tells the engaging story of Europa, the oceanic moon. It features a large number of stunning images of the ocean moons surface, clearly displaying the spectacular crack patterns, extensive rifts and ridges, and refrozen pools of exposed water filled with rafts of displaced ice. Coverage also features firsthand accounts of Galileos mission to Jupiter and its moons. The book tells the rough and tumble inside story of a very human enterprise in science that lead to the discovery of a fantastic new world that might well harbor life.

This book features firsthand accounts of Galileos mission to Jupiter and stunning images of Europa's surface. It tells the inside story of a very human enterprise in science that lead to the discovery of a fantastic new world that might well harbor life.

A Close Look at Europa . . .

And How Big Science Gets Done . . .

The second-outward of Jupiter's four major moons, Europa is covered with ice, as confirmed in views from modern telescopes and the thousands of images returned by NASA's Voyager and Galileo missions. But these higher-resolution views also showed that the ice is anything but smooth. In fact, Europa's surface is covered with vast criss-crossing systems of mountain-sized ridges, jumbled regions of seemingly chaotic terrain, and patches that suggest upwellings of new surface materials from below. How scientists think about the underlying forces that shaped this incredibly complex, bizarre, and beautiful surface is the subject of this book.

In Unmasking Europa, Richard Greenberg tells the story of how he and his team of researchers came to believe that the surface of Europa is in fact a crust so thin that it can barely hide an ocean of liquid water below. He shows l3ã