The last of my great New Mexico adventures begins this week on planetary radio. Welcome to the travel show that takes you to the final frontier and this week

far below the surface of our own planet.

I'm Matt Kaplan, the Planetary Society.

There was just too much of my visit to Carl's Bad Caverns National Park

and the International Planetary Caves Workshop to fit into one show,

but we'll get an exciting start this week.

First though, we'll make our usual online visit to Emily Lottawala

for an update on the Planetary Society blog.

Emily, big week last week in the blog for the Galilean satellites,

particularly Europa.

Tell us about, well, you didn't see it, but you read about this big press conference last week.

There is a press conference last week that was talking about some rather exciting news on

Europa about some water that was much closer to the surface than most scientists had thought.

And of course, water on Europa always makes people excited about the possibility of maybe

there being life there underneath the ice.

So it's always big news when we talk about water on Europa.

Apparently this may help to put to rest an old argument about thin ice versus thick ice?

That's right. There's this seemingly intractable argument between two camps of Europa scientists.

I know that's not how science is supposed to work, but how it was in this case.

There are people who looked at these things called chaos terrains on Europa that really

look like icebergs floating in a frozen ocean and they say, hey, look, the water must have melted all the way through to the surface on Europa in the past. The problem is that the physics with that just does not work.

Europa is so very cold that ice there, it's like rock is on Earth.

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