Yes it is. Wikipedia says Europa’s rotation is synchronous with its orbit around Jupiter. Tides wouldn’t occur on Europa, to speak of.
I stand corrected on a finer point.
Why?
Is there any other way for a robotic mission to figure out if there’s a subsurface ocean or its characteristics except drilling/melting through the ice? For example, would it be possible to send a soundwave through the mantle by setting off a nuke or crashing something big into it very fast while having some sort of receiving station on the other side? Isn’t examining sounds traveling through the earth’s interior how we know so much about what’s inside the earth?
The Jupiter system isn’t like the Earth - Moon system. Jupiter has 4 great moons which tidally affect one another. Io is the most active volcanic body in the solar system and is entirely heated through tidal forces caused by Jupiter and the other moons. This website has a great description: http://www.planetaryexploration.net/jupiter/io/tidal_heating.html
Europa would also be exposed to these same forces though weaker. This is the reason scientists are so excited about a liquid ocean on Europa, and where there’s water there’s good chance there’s life.
If there is life on Europa it would be our duty to study it, but to do so in a way we don’t contaminate the ecosystem with our own parasites. Mainly we want to have as long as possible to study pristine alien life in its native environment. Of all the planets in the solar system, Europa (a moon I know) is the one I’m most excited about visiting.
Europa is the most fun because one can let the imagination go wild with ideas like an ocean full of large, ferocious, blind critters or even something crazy like a civilization of echolocating dolphin people. But we may have to settle for Enceladus. And hey, Mars could still have some germs clinging to subsurface ice somewhere…
Exactly! Mars was once very similar to Earth with a thick, warm atmosphere and oceans. Life that formed there would have been analogous to life on Earth so if any life still exists it will be a window to the earliest life here. But Europa has an ocean that likely has existed for billions of years with volcanic vents keeping things nice and warm. If there is life there it could very well have evolved to a multi-cellular level which would be, to quote Spock, fascinating.
So correct me If I’m wrong, but this is much more a problem of finances rather than capabilities?
The mass of the probe is a huge issue. You’re going to need a very massive probe to get through the ice because it’s going to have to carry 100+ km of cable, and land safely with it, plus no one has tested such a device. Plus there’s question of using an autonomous explorer or a tethered one. The latter has been tested but is vastly more massive; I don’t think the former has.
Thanks, Frazzled. That explanation I can buy.
HAHAHAHA! I’ve been laughing at Echolocating Dolphin People for over an hour! Thank you. (Band Name!!!)
And imagination on this is huge. But on the real aspect, if we could find just one little algae, frozen, dead or alive, even that would be AWESOME! If the algae looked and talked like Sheldon Plankton, we could have a live actor on Spongebob! 
The contraction of its formation would have heated it. This heat takes a while to dissipate. Europa’s core is prbably cold now, but it was most likely once radiating heat.
I stand corrected again. I was considering only Europa and Jupiter.
If the core is rocky, it likely still does, from radioactive decay.
I’d say the concensus is a metallic core, so yes, there is a probability that Europa still has some heat coming from the core for this reason. However, it is likely that it is very little.
It is a fortunate matter, period, for the purposes of finding ET life, that Europa is not warmer. If it was warm enough to have water vapor, instead of ice, it most likely would have lost that water vapor long ago, being too small to retain much atmosphere.
Wouldn’t Jupiters tidal forces cause ice quakes, making the ice less a solid lump to get through ?
I suspect religious fundamentalists of all religions wouldn’t be happy about the discovery of even microscopic life on another world, judging by the multifarious arguments aginst space exploration that they come up with.
That happens a lot in Ben Bova’s Grand Tour series (the New Morality playing the role of anti-science bete noir), but I never heard a RL fundamentalist argue against space travel as impious or anything. Have you?
What’s RL fundamentalist?
Real life.
But then how can we eat, fuck, enslave, or otherwise exploit it?
Look, we have to make an ethical choice here that will influence future courses of history. And I say it will be more fun to live in the Bearded-Spock Future. Long Live the Terran Empire!