WATCH LIVE: NASA is revealing new discoveries about alien ocean worlds

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April 13, 2017 2:50 PM

The discoveries made by Cassini and the Hubble telescope could help guide the search for life beyond Earth, NASA says.

Earth's bounty of liquid, life-giving water is not unique.

The solar system is teeming with ocean worlds, including ice-covered moons like Saturn's Enceladus and Jupiter's Europa. Beneath their thick, icy shells are vast volumes of water that may be habitable to extraterrestrial life.

To that end, NASA is holding a press conference Thursday to present "new results about ocean worlds in our solar system," and discuss how that information will impact "the broader search for life beyond Earth."

NASA's new discoveries stem from the Hubble space telescope and the Cassini probe, which is scheduled to commit suicide this summer in the clouds of Saturn.

In 2015, Cassini revealed that Enceladus had a global subsurface ocean, and that water was spewing out of cracks in its icy crust. Hubble has helped show that Europa also harbors its own globe-spanning ocean.

You can watch the space agency's big briefing on NASA TV (below) starting at 2 p.m. EDT on Thursday, April 13.

In a press release for the briefing, NASA noted that the new results will affect the space agency's multi-billion-dollar Europa Clipper mission.

NASA also said it will take questions during the live-video announcement — anyone can submit queries using the #AskNASA hashtag on Twitter.

In addition to streaming the briefing on YouTube, NASA will also host a feed on its own site.

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