Europa

Europa is the smallest of the four Galilean moons orbiting Jupiter. It is primarily made of silicate rock and has a water-ice crust and an iron–nickel core. It has a very thin atmosphere, composed primarily of oxygen. Its surface is striated by cracks and streaks, but craters are relatively few.

Exploration of Europa by humanity began with the Jupiter flybys of Pioneer 10 and 11 in 1973 and 1974 respectively. The first close-up photos were of low resolution compared to later missions. The two Voyager probes travelled through the Jovian system in 1979, providing more-detailed images of Europa's icy surface. The images caused many scientists to speculate about the possibility of a liquid ocean underneath. Starting in 1995, the Galileo space probe orbited Jupiter for eight years, until 2003, and provided the most detailed examination of the Galilean moons to date. It included the "Galileo Europa Mission" and "Galileo Millennium Mission", with numerous close flybys of Europa. In 2007, New Horizons imaged Europa, as it flew by the Jovian system while on its way to Pluto.

Having a large icy surface, with sub-surface water and an oxygen atmosphere (if thin), Europa was a prime candidate for early colonisation efforts from Earth. Indeed it was the suggestion that perhaps mankind itself should be modified to the conditions on Europa that allowed previously covert genetic engineering experiments on the Indian subcontinent to come to the surface. Proposals to colonise Europa can be said, in some way, to be responsible for the outbreak of the Eugenics Wars but, perhaps only for them breaking out in the late 2020s rather than ten or fifteen years later. It is believed that at the end of the Eugenics Wars, Khan Noonien Singh and his few remaining loyal followers had intended to set course not for deep space, where they were eventually found, but for Europa, where their Augmented bodies would prove capable of taming the harsh landscape.

In the end, the Dictator was lost, and Europa was not fully surveyed and walked on by ("inferior", unengineered) humanity until the voyages of the S.S Valiant in the early 22nd Century. The moon was found to be bereft of life, a somewhat disappointing revelation after the theories put forwards in the 20th and 21st Centuries about what may have lain under the ice.

The unusual gravitational pulls of Jupiter and the other Galilean moons made navigation around Europa somewhat difficult, and it's orbital period somewhat erratic, and by the time United Earth science had reached a point where this could be accounted for, the enthusiasm was for extra-solar colony efforts. Europa was seen as a backwater, with no useful resources to be exploited. No Raw Dilithium or exotic green women. It wasn't until 2284, after the Whale Probe Crisis, that Europa found a new purpose. After the re-introduction of the formerly extinct species of Humpback Whale to Earth's oceans via a (illegal) temporal incursion into the 20th Century by Admiral James T. Kirk‏‎, the Federation decided to set up a new Cetacean Science Institute on Europa, giving over the formerly sterile oceans of the world to the newly discovered sentient species and their required food sources.