Tracy Drain

That's what's going on inside the moon Europa and inside where it probably has a rocky core that squishing and releasing is creating enough heat.

They call it tidal heating in order to melt a lot of the water under that frozen cap of ice.

You got it.

Same thing.

Right, not my field.

And we like to say, just to be scientifically careful about it, is that the moon has the capability, may have the capability of supporting that.

Yeah, I know.

Trying to get me fired here.

It could possibly support some kind of life.

And the thing that I think people are looking for is there's this lovely, very hard to pronounce acronym that I've learned called CHINOPS, which is carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, sulfur.

that if those elements are there and you have water and you have some kind of energy source, which might be the tidal heating coming from below, and also the weak sunlight and radiation coming from above, the combination of those things could potentially be viable for life.

And for me, as just a normal human out there, I find that very exciting and super tantalizing that scientists are trying to go and investigate.

I think I have heard that scientists believe there is a rocky core.

This is where my own particular science is a little bit fuzzy about that.

And I'm not even sure how much Europa is going to learn about that.

I know that our ground-penetrating, ice-penetrating radar is going to go down fairly deep.

It'll tell us how thick the ice is.

It'll give us a sense of the depth of the ocean.

And I think perhaps the magnetometer will teach us a little bit more about the entire makeup of the inside.

I think there is a rocky core.