Europa, one of Jupiter’s 95 moons, generates 1,000 tons of oxygen every 24 hours, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory said Monday.
It’s enough oxygen to keep a million humans breathing each day, but it’s substantially less than scientists previously believed existed, researchers said. The amount of oxygen could impact the moon’s underground ocean, which is thought to contain twice as much water as all of Earth’s oceans combined.
Europa, the sixth-closest moon to Jupiter, is slightly smaller than Earth’s moon, according to NASA. Like Earth, Europa is believed to have a rocky mantle and an iron core.
The findings, published Monday in the journal Nature Astronomy, show Europa’s producing around 26 pounds of oxygen every second. Scientists previously estimated that the moon could be producing more than 2,000 pounds of oxygen every second.
The newest estimate was made based on the amount of hydrogen being released from Europa’s surface. The data was gathered by NASA’s space probe Juno, which flew by Europa in 2022.
“Juno brought a new capability to directly measure the composition of charged particles shed from Europa’s atmosphere, and we couldn’t wait to further peek behind the curtain of this exciting water world,” lead author James Szalay of Princeton University said. “But what we didn’t realize is that Juno’s observations would give us such a tight constraint on the amount of oxygen produced in Europa’s icy surface.”
