NASA’s Europa mission is a homecoming for one planetary astronomer

>Planetary astronomer Bonnie Buratti remembers exactly where she was the first time she heard that Jupiter’s icy moon Europa might host life.

>It was the 1980s, and Buratti was a graduate student at Cornell University studying images of the planet’s moons taken during the Voyager 1 and 2 flybys in 1979. Even in those first low-resolution snapshots, Europa was intriguing.

>“It looked like a cracked egg,” she says.

>Those cracks — in a snow-covered, icy shell — were probably filled with material that had welled up from below, Buratti and colleagues had shown. That meant there had to be something underneath the ice.

>Buratti recalls fellow grad student Steven Squyres giving a talk about the possibility that Europa’s ice hid a salty liquid ocean. “He said, ‘Well, there’s an ocean underneath, and where there’s water, there’s life,’” she recalls. “And people laughed at him.”

>They’re not laughing anymore.

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