Washington DC, Jan. 30 -- NASA on Thursday said that new analysis of decades-old data has turned up a significant result- the first discovery of ammonia-bearing compounds on the surface of Jupiter's moon Europa.

"Ammonia is a nitrogen-bearing molecule, and nitrogen -- like carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen -- is key to life as we know it. As the first such detection at Europa, the finding has important implications for the geology and potential habitability of this icy world and its vast subsurface ocean", the statement said.

It highlighted that between 1995 and 2003, NASA's Galileo spacecraft studied the Jupiter system, and a recent paper by researcher Al Emran of the agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California re-examined dat...