Nov 25, 2014 09:53 AM EST By Russell Westerholm, UniversityHerald Reporter

NASA has released a new, stunning image of Jupiter's moon Europa, which may be the best and nearest place in the universe to look for signs of life as it is on Earth.

According to Space.com, the new image comes from the Galileo mission from the 1990s with NASA scientists reprocessing old images with new technology. The result is a high-res image of Europa's veiny surface.

"The story of life on Earth may have begun in our oceans, and that's because - of course - if we've learned anything about life on Earth, it's that where you find the liquid water, you generally find life," Kevin Hand, an astrobiologist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said in a newly released video.

NASA said the image's color has been enhanced and that it reveals more of the moon's surface than any other photo of it. The space agency hopes to explore Europa more exhaustively in decades to come because they believe the moon has water underneath its icy exterior.

"The scene shows the stunning diversity of Europa's surface geology. Long, linear cracks and ridges crisscross the surface, interrupted by regions of disrupted terrain where the surface ice crust has been broken up and re-frozen into new patterns," NASA said in a statement.

"Color variations across the surface are associated with differences in geologic feature type and location. For example, areas that appear blue or white contain relatively pure water ice, while reddish and brownish areas include non-ice components in higher concentrations. The polar regions, visible at the left and right of this view, are noticeably bluer than the more equatorial latitudes, which look more white. This color variation is thought to be due to differences in ice grain size in the two locations."

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