"Juno's Europa Flyby Reveals Oxygen Scarcity in Subsurface Ocean"
NASA's Juno mission to Jupiter has discovered that Jupiter's moon Europa produces around 26 pounds of oxygen every second, substantially less than previous estimates. This finding was derived by measuring hydrogen outgassing from the moon's surface using data collected by the spacecraft's Jovian Auroral Distributions Experiment (JADE) instrument. Scientists believe that some of the oxygen produced could work its way into Europa's subsurface ocean as a possible source of metabolic energy, raising curiosity about the potential for life-supporting conditions to exist below the moon's surface. Juno's observations provide a tight constraint on the amount of oxygen produced in Europa's icy surface, and this discovery will be further investigated by NASA's Europa Clipper mission when it arrives at Jupiter in 2030.
