A team including Jamey Szalay, a Research Scholar in the Department of Astrophysical Sciences recently published a paper discussing the amount of oxygen that has been found on Jupiter’s moon Europa.  Using data from the Jovian Auroral Distributions Experiment (JADE) instrument on the Juno mission, the team determined that Europa “generates 1,000 tons of oxygen every 24 hours – enough to keep a million humans breathing for a day.”

Szalay explained to the New York Times that “it’s on the lower end of what we would expect, it’s not totally prohibitive” for habitability.  

The paper can be found at Nature Astronomy and articles about the discovery have been published by NASA and the New York Times.

Congratulations to Jamey!