NASA is to announce a new finding which the space agency says will ‘inform the broader search for life beyond Earth’.

The space agency will announce the new finding at 2pm on Thursday this week.

The finding comes from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft, which is in orbit around Saturn, and from the Hubble space telescope.

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‘These new discoveries will help inform future ocean world exploration – including NASA’s upcoming Europa Clipper mission planned for launch in the 2020s – and the broader search for life beyond Earth,’ NASA said.

The event will be held at the James Webb Auditorium at NASA’s headquarters in Washington.

Speakers include several members of the team from the Cassini orbiter, fuelling speculation that the announcement could be about Enceladus, Saturn’s sixth-largest moon.

Others suspect that the announcement could relate to Jupiter’s moon Europa – target of NASA’s Clipper mission.

Europa is thought to have a liquid ocean beneath its surface, holding twice as much water as there is on Earth, according to NASA.

NASA aims to put a spacecraft in orbit around Europa in the 2020s.