Europa is the real prize
The European Space Agency’s ambitious mission to Jupiter, JUICE, will visit its fire-and-ice moons – volcanic Io, icy Europa, giant Ganymede, and cratered Callisto – in the 2030s. But it will only provide a glimpse of Europa’s surface from a couple of close flybys. With the announcement of the NASA-led Europa Clipper mission, now it looks like a much closer inspection of Europa is on the cards.
The
Europa Clipper Mission
would place a spacecraft in orbit around Jupiter in order to perform a detailed investigation of the giant planet's moon Europa -- a world that shows strong evidence for an ocean of liquid water beneath its icy crust and which could host conditions favorable for life. The mission would send a highly capable, radiation-tolerant spacecraft into a long, looping orbit around Jupiter to perform repeated close flybys of Europa.
The possible payload of science instruments under consideration includes radar to penetrate the frozen crust and determine the thickness of the ice shell, an infrared spectrometer to investigate the composition of Europa's surface materials, a topographic camera for high-resolution imaging of surface features, and an ion and neutral mass spectrometer to analyze the moon's trace atmosphere during flybys.
More over the Orange Debris of the Kosmos
Continuing from the first link:
Neither JUICE nor Clipper will reach the surface or the ocean below – that’s too great a technological challenge for now. But if habitable conditions for life are discovered beyond Earth, particularly somewhere as far from the Sun as Jupiter and its moons, this could mean that habitable conditions are commonplace throughout our universe.
So, no, I don't think anybody is thinking "Europa -Home Sweet Home" as it's impossibly cold there.
But Mars is mostly dead and Europa seems quite alive so that's where the science is going to go.
Based on what we have seen and learned about on Mars for the last 2 years, my gut feeling is that life is spread all across the Universe.
And we might just have our concept of 'life' totally overhauled, too.
Too bad we have to waste so much money on stupid things. The MSL-Curiosity mission cost $2.5 billion and will last for years. We blow over 10 times that amount YEARLY on you-know-what.
And, as always: All these worlds are yours, except for Europa: Attempt NO LANDING there