Equatorial regions of the potentially life-supporting Europa, which harbors a huge ocean of salty liquid water beneath its icy shell, are probably studded with blades of ice up to 50 feet (15 meters) tall, a new study suggests. Excitingly, the Europa Clipper mission may be a forerunner to a landing mission on the Jovian moon, in which a probe would drill through the icy surface and plunge into the dark ocean beneath. “You go straight from solid ice into water vapor, because there is no air.”

Europa seems to have all the right elements for penitentes to grow

Based on data gathered by NASA’s old Galileo probe, Hobley and his team estimated how much sublimation is happening on Europa, or how quickly ice is thought to turn into vapor on the moon when exposed to the Sun. As ice turns directly into water vapour without first melting into a liquid, the distinctive formations are left behind. Due in part to its salt water ocean, Europa is one of the more promising candidates for extraterrestrial life in our solar system, NASA said, so the moon has been targeted as destination for a future space mission. “We’re really hoping that the Clipper mission will tell us one way or the other,” Daniel Hobley, a geologist and planetary scientist at Cardiff University in the UK, as well as lead author on the study, tells The Verge.
New research suggests Europa, a moon of Jupiter, may be covered in tall, jagged ice spikes, presenting a problem for any potential landing on its surface.