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Canon Europa NV is located approximately 18km South-West of Amsterdam in Amstelveen. You can find details of how to reach us in the Our Locations section.

There are around 500 people employed in Amstelveen. This includes more than 80 expatriates from Japan and about the same number of expatriates from other countries. We also employ a further 11,000 people across Europe, Africa and the Middle East.

Galileo imaging shows that Europa's surface is sparsely cratered, meaning that the surface is probably young. Simulations of comet and asteroid orbits indicate that it is primarily comets which slam into Europa and the other Galilean satellites. From the modeled and observed numbers of comets in the vicinity of Jupiter today, estimates can be made for the surface age of Europa based on the number and sizes of the moon's impact craters.

In close-up pictures of Europa's "chaos" region, it can be seen that there are "blocks" or "plates" which have moved about relative to one another. These have informally been referred to as "icebergs," but this term is improperly suggestive, invoking visions of ice chunks floating in terrestrial polar seas. On Europa it would be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to melt from a subsurface ocean all the way to the surface.

According to David Morrison in the introduction to the book "Satellites of Jupiter," both Americans and Russians can lay some claim to the discovery. He writes: "Near-infrared photometry provided the first clue to surface composition; in a landmark abstract Kuiper (1957) suggested from limited data, never published, that Europa and Ganymede had water ice surfaces, and Moroz (1961) later came to the same conclusion from similar broadband infrared observations."

Launch of the Europa Orbiter mission has been delayed until perhaps 2006 or 2007. Travel time to Jupiter is about 3 years, then it takes another 2.5 years or so to drop into Europa orbit. This means arrival in 2013 or 2014. The mission itself would last only a month or two after that, but enough to make critical measurements.

Europa's geological features (including bands, ridges, chaos, and multi-ringed impact structures) are indicative of warm, mobile, glacial ice at relatively shallow depths, and sometimes reaching the surface. Beneath this warm "slushy" ice could be a liquid water ocean, but it is difficult to be certain with the data that are in hand. Tidal heating is greatly aided by the presence of an ocean, so a warm near-surface is suggestive of a subsurface ocean.

The sum of theoretical and observational data indicate that Europa's the icy shell is ~15 to 25 km thick, overlying an ocean approximately 80 km deep. A comprehensive theoretical estimate of the ice shell thickness is given by Ojakangas and Stevenson (1989), who look at the influences of tidal and radiogenic heating. They find that the ice shell should be an average thickness of ~20 to 30 km.

If a Europa Orbiter mission finds strong evidence for a subsurface ocean on Europa, then there will be strong scientific justification to send a follow-on lander mission to Europa. A seismometer could detect for certain whether there is liquid water at depth and how deep that water is (assuming the satellite is seismically active). An electromagnetic technique called "magnetotellurics" could measure the current generated in subsurface water in response to the ambient magnetic field.