It sounds like we don’t know enough to even consider landing a probe, let alone something completely unprecedented like drilling a deep hole. This mission, if I

It sounds like we don’t know enough to even consider landing a probe, let alone something completely unprecedented like drilling a deep hole. This mission, if I understand the article, will attempt to determine the depth of the surface, its constituency, and possibly the constituency of what’s below it. It may be that Europa is not geothermally active as we hope, and is made up entirely of ice and other simple inorganic compounds. That would likely shift our efforts to other, more promising targets of exploration in the solar system. Drilling is many steps ahead of where we are at.