in Greek mythology, the daughter either of Phoenix or of Agenor, king of Phoenicia. The beauty of Europa inspired the love of Zeus, who approached her in the form of a white bull and carried her away from Phoenicia to Crete. There she bore Zeus three sons: Minos, ruler of Crete; Rhadamanthys, ruler of the Cyclades Islands; and, according to some legends, Sarpedon, ruler of Lycia. She later married Asterius, the king of Crete, who adopted her sons, and she was worshipped under the name of Hellotis in Crete, where the festival Hellotia was held in her honour.

the smallest and second nearest of the four large moons (Galilean satellites) discovered around Jupiter by the Italian astronomer Galileo in 1610. It was probably also discovered independently that same year by the German astronomer Simon Marius (Marius, Simon), who named it after Europa of Greek mythology. Europa is a rocky object covered with an extremely smooth, elaborately patterned surface of ice.

Europa was first observed at close range in 1979 by the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft and then by the Galileo orbiter beginning in the mid-1990s. The satellite's surface is very bright and the smoothest of any known solid body in the solar system. Some regions near the equator are slightly darker and have a mottled appearance. Spectroscopic observations carried out from Galileo have identified deposits of salt minerals in these areas, which suggest evaporation of liquids brought up from below. The traces of frozen sulfuric acid and sulfur dioxide (sulfur oxide) that have been detected may owe their origin to the nearby volcanically active moon Io. There are also indications of organic compounds and hydrogen peroxide, which is probably frozen in the ice. Europa has far fewer impact craters than most other objects in the solar system—evidence that its surface is relatively young. The surface is crisscrossed by an intricate array of curvilinear grooves and ridges that create a tracery unlike anything else seen in the solar system. The markings are as much as several tens of kilometres in width and extend in some instances for thousands of kilometres. Their origin is unknown, but they may be fractures caused by the stretching of Europa's crust due to tides raised by Jupiter's gravitational pull.

The flatness of Europa's surface indicates that the icy crust was relatively warm, soft, and mobile for at least a substantial part of its early history. Pictures from Galileo have revealed that in some areas the outermost ice layer fractured and huge blocks of ice have rotated from their original positions and even tilted before being refrozen in place. Evidently, the subsurface layer was semifluid at some time in the past, although additional spacecraft missions are needed to tell when this happened and whether a subsurface ocean of water still exists. The partial melting of the ice could have been caused by tidal heating, a much milder expression of the same source of energy that powers the volcanoes of Io. Confirmation of the presence of liquid water and a long-term source of energy would open the possibility that some form of life exists on Europa. (See the article extraterrestrial life.)