Sometimes, scientists have the answers all along—they just don’t think to ask the question. For example, it appears that in 1997, the Galileo orbiter flew through a jet of water shooting out from Jupiter’s moon Europa without even trying.
Scientists think that Europa has an ocean below its icy surface, which could be a big deal. When we hear water, we think “life,” and maybe life found a way in Europa’s ocean. Recent Hubble space telescope images appeared to show evidence for this ocean in the form of plumes of water shooting forth from cracks in the moon’s surface ice. So, a team of researchers in the U.S. thought, maybe there’s more evidence for these plumes elsewhere, like in 20-year-old data from the Galileo orbiter.
“This wasn’t planned out,” study author Xianzhe Jia from the University of Michigan told Gizmodo. “It just so happened that the spacecraft passed through a region where we saw plumes. It was fortuitous.”
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