SPACE: Yes, Europa really is sending plumes of water into space.

The Hubble findings were tentative but intriguing, so a team of US astronomers went back and took a second look at data collected by the Galileo spacecraft during its eight-year stay in the Jovian system. During that time, the spacecraft made 11 flybys of Europa, including one in which it came to within a few hundred kilometers of the moon’s surface.

To their delight, the scientists found such a signal on December 16, 1997, during the spacecraft’s E12 orbit. This was also Galileo’s closest approach to Europa, when it came to within 206km and flew near the Pwyll Crater region. During this pass, the spacecraft’s magnetometer measured significant changes, as did Galileo’s plasma wave spectrometer. They believed these fluctuations might be due to perturbations from a water plume in the plasma surrounding the moon.

“The sudden, short-duration jump in the frequency of intense emissions can be interpreted as consistent with a highly localized source of plasma, thereby supporting the hypothesis that the magnetic perturbations arise from passage through a localized plume,” write the authors of a new paper describing the findings in Nature Astronomy.

Sounds like we should attempt no landings there.