OU gets £787k funding to reveal the hidden mineral record of Jupiter’s icy moons

An Open University (OU) team, led by Dr Mark Fox-Powell, has received a research grant with a value of £787,300 from the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) to transform our understanding of how surface materials on Jupiter’s icy moons record their complex histories. The project, Unlocking the cryomineral record of oceansurface transport at Jupiter's icy moons, will build on the OU’s growing international leadership in laboratory ice–ocean analogue studies that support current and upcoming space missions.

Europa and Ganymede (two of Jupiter’s largest moons) harbour vast subsurface oceans beneath their frozen exteriors. These hidden oceans are among the most promising places in our Solar System to search for past or present habitability. However, interpreting their potential relies on understanding how ocean-derived salts freeze, alter, and transform as they are transported to the surface. Until recently, this cryogenic mineral “fingerprint” has remained largely uncharted.

The new STFC-funded project expands on the OU team’s previous success in identifying how sodium chloride (NaCl) behaves under rapid freezing conditions. Building on these insights, researchers will now systematically investigate the full suite of major salts thought to be present on Europa and Ganymede, many of which may form unusual, metastable minerals when subjected to extreme cryogenic environments.

Using a proven experimental workflow established during earlier STFC-supported work, the team will combine thermal analysis, infrared spectroscopy, and advanced synchrotron beamline experiments to achieve three key objectives:

1. Screening icy-moon salts to determine which can form metastable minerals during rapid freezing, an essential process thought to occur during ocean upwelling and resurfacing events.
2. Quantifying how freezing rate influences mineral formation, providing a new way to infer the environmental history of surface materials and pinpoint regions most likely to preserve clues about ocean composition and habitability.
3. Developing a robust infrared diagnostic technique to detect these minerals within complex salt mixtures, directly supporting instrumentation carried by imminent missions such as ESA’s JUICE and NASA’s Europa Clipper.

By the end of the project, the team will deliver the first quantitative framework capable of linking surface mineralogy on icy worlds to their freezing and transport histories. This breakthrough will give planetary scientists an entirely new tool for interpreting remote-sensing data and identifying high-priority regions for future exploration.

This award reinforces The Open University’s commitment to cutting-edge planetary science and strengthens the UK’s contribution to the next decade of outer Solar System exploration.