March 31, 2021 The ocean on Europa, one of Jupiter’s four Galilean moons, contains sodium chloride – common table salt. Samantha Trumbo ’13, a doctoral student in planetary science at the California Institute of Technology, will follow up on this breakthrough discovery, which she made using data from the Hubble Space Telescope, as a 51 Pegasi b Fellow hosted by the astronomy department in the College of Arts and Sciences (A&S). Samantha Trumbo “For so long, Europa appeared as just a tiny dot in the sky, but it’s really a world in and of itself,” said Trumbo, who studied astronomy and biological sciences in A&S as an undergraduate. “Its subsurface ocean of liquid water could be potentially habitable. That’s what drove my research – I wanted to understand that ocean environment.”