The subsurface water on Jupiter’s moon Europa probably has a similar salty taste to Earth’s oceans.

This is according to scientists who mapped the frozen moon in greater detail than ever before and discovered a new salt compound on its surface. Their research suggests that if you could somehow get to the distant, tiny world, survive the deadly radiation at its surface, drill through its 100-km-thick icy shell, and drink the water without dying, the taste would be somewhat familiar.

Europa is an odd dynamic world covered in strange cracks and mysterious salty chemicals. The moon is thought to have a gigantic ocean with two or three times the amount of water on Earth sitting below its frozen exterior. Because of this, it is considered to be one of the most likely places to find life in our solar system outside of Earth and this new finding definitely kicks the moon’s badassness up a few notches.

Long bands filled with reddish-brown material crisscross Europa’s surface. Scientists know that the red material is composed of water ice and something else. Exactly what that something else is has been a subject of intense debate, though the leading hypotheses suggest it is a mixture of salts containing elements such as sodium, magnesium, and sulfur.

Some of these salts are thought to come from the subsurface ocean, which could flow up through the ice and explode in the vacuum of space, raining minerals all over the frozen shell. Complicating the picture is the fact that Europa’s volcanic sister moon, Io, spews sulfur out into space, which then comes to rest on the icy moon. Figuring out exactly which salts come from the ocean and which come from elsewhere has been a big challenge.

Using the Keck telescope in Hawaii, scientists mapped Europa’s surface in infrared wavelengths with 40 times greater resolution than previously obtained. They noticed a never-before-seen spectrum that matched a magnesium sulfate salt called epsomite. But the magnesium sulfate compound was only found on one half of the moon: the hemisphere that receives most of the material ejected from Io.

The researchers think one scenario to explain this finding is that salts trickle up from Europa’s ocean. Some of these salts contain magnesium, which then combines with the sulfur from Io, explaining why the magnesium sulfate is only seen on one side of Europa. This means that the ocean contains some other magnesium compound, very likely magnesium chloride, because models show that Europa’s oceans are either sulfate-rich or chlorine-rich. A chlorine-rich ocean on Europa would contain many other compounds, such as sodium and potassium chloride.

Ordinary table salt – NaCl, or sodium chloride – is found in great abundances in Earth’s oceans. So Europa’s oceans might not be all that different from our own, a finding that bolsters the idea that the moon could harbor living organisms similar to our own planet.

The research will appear in an upcoming issue of the Astronomical Journal (.pdf).