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Europa

The huge rocket NASA is developing to get astronauts to an asteroid, Mars and other distant destinations should also greatly aid robotic exploration efforts, members of Congress were told Tuesday (July 28). ...

As an example, Grunsfeld cited NASA's planned flyby mission to Jupiter's ocean-harboring moon Europa, which the agency aims to launch in the early to mid-2020s. Using SLS instead of currently available rockets would slash the probe's journey to the Jupiter system from about eight years to less than three years, Grunsfeld said. (Mission team members are developing the Europa flyby craft to fit on a variety of different launch vehicles, including SLS.)

"This is one of those rare cases where time really is money," he said. "In that extra cruise time, you know, we have to maintain an engineering team and a science team and a spacecraft while it's in cruise, even if we hibernate. And that's something that also delays the science." ...

http://www.space.com/30082-nasa-sls...id=626444597745455104&adbpl=tw&adbpr=15431856
 
Has anyone seen "The Europa Report", a lot less fantastic than 2001, and 10. Based I guess on more believable space exploration endeavor of reaching Europa. It's interesting to watch, especially the landing on Europa, they did a good Job on creating a believable environment. End is a bit off, but it had to come to an end somehow. :)
 
Waylander28 said:
Has anyone seen "The Europa Report", a lot less fantastic than 2001, and 10. Based I guess on more believable space exploration endeavor of reaching Europa. It's interesting to watch, especially the landing on Europa, they did a good Job on creating a believable environment. End is a bit off, but it had to come to an end somehow. :)
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Yes, good film rather than a great one.
 
I was waiting in the local garage today, getting new tyres fitted, and was reading a copy of National Geographic magazine.
That issue was dedicated to life on other planets and it prominently featured Europa. Interestingly, even though Europa is tiny, it contains more water than all the oceans on this planet. Also, it has a thin atmosphere composed mostly of oxygen (which is interesting in itself).
I think it may be candidate number 2 for future colonisation, in spite of Jupiter's proximity.

Edit: Mind you, the tidal forces there are huge. That may make colonisation a bit difficult.
 
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The team mapping out NASA's mission to the ocean-harboring Jupiter moon Europa met for the first time last week.

Scientists and engineers on the mission, which seeks to determine if Europais capable of supporting life, got together at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California. The chief goal of this first meeting was to start refining the mission's planned science operations, with a particular emphasis on how its nine instruments will work together to investigate Europa's habitability, agency officials said.

"That's why we're here, in one room, at the very start of the project," Robert Pappalardo, Europa project scientist at JPL, said at the meeting, according to a NASA press release. "So we can begin to function as one team, to understand the cross-cutting science issues we all face, and so we can use all of our tools together to understand Europa."

NASA aims to launch the as-yet-unnamed Europa mission, which will likely cost about $2 billion, in the early to mid-2020s. The spacecraft would reach Jupiter in about eight years if launched on currently available rockets, and in less than three years if lofted by NASA's in-development Space Launch System megarocket, NASA officials have said.

http://www.space.com/30229-nasa-europa-mission-team-first-meeting.html?cmpid=514648
 
NASA's upcoming mission to Europa may actually touch down on the potentially life-harboring Jupiter moon.

While the main thrust of the Europa mission, which NASA aims to launch by the mid-2020s, involves characterizing the icy satellite from afar during dozens of flybys, the space agency is considering sending a small probe down to the surface as well.

"We are actively pursuing the possibility of a lander," Robert Pappalardo, Europa project scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, said last week during a panel discussion at the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics' Space 2015 conference in Pasadena. (JPL manages the Europa mission.) [Europa May Harbor Simple Life-Forms (Video)]

"NASA has asked us to investigate: What would it take? How much would it cost? Could we put a small surface package on Europa with this mission?" Pappalardo added.

NASA has also asked the European Space Agency if it would be interested in contributing a lander, ice-penetrating impactor or other piggyback probe to the roughly $2 billion Europa mission, Spaceflight Now reported in April.

http://www.space.com/30476-nasa-eur...id=643046479750270976&adbpl=tw&adbpr=15431856
 
Comets or asteroids slamming into Jupiter's moon Europa might explain the chaotic jumble of icy blocks seen across the satellite's surface, researchers say.

This theory suggests that cosmic impacts might have helped deliver the ingredients for life into the hidden oceans that scientists think lurk beneath the surfaces of Europa and several other frozen moons in the solar system, investigators added.

"It is not evidence for the existence of life, but it increases the suitability of Europa's ocean as a habitat, increasing our interest in going there to look and find out for sure," study lead author Rónadh Cox, a geologist at Williams College at Williamstown, Massachusetts, told Space.com. [6 Most Likely Places for Alien Life in the Solar System]

Europa is almost the size of Earth's moon. Under an ice shell maybe 10 to 15 miles (15 to 25 kilometers) thick, researchers think Europa possesses ahuge liquid-water ocean up to 100 miles (160 km) deep.

http://www.space.com/30868-jupiter-...id=656526551899467776&adbpl=tw&adbpr=15431856
 
There's a good chance that NASA's highly anticipated Europa mission will do much more than just fly by the ocean-harboring Jupiter moon.

NASA has already selected the nine primary science instruments for theEuropa spacecraft, whose core mission involves performing dozens of flybys to gauge the Jovian satellite's life-hosting potential. But the probe should be able to accommodate an additional 550 lbs. (250 kilograms) of payload, and NASA would rather not let that "excess" go to waste.

"There's a variety of things that we can do," Jim Green, the head of NASA's Planetary Science division, said here Tuesday (Dec. 15) during a town hall presentation at the annual fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU). "Perhaps plume probes, perhaps penetrators, or even a small lander." [Europa May Harbor Simple Life-Forms (Video)]





Researchers are studying these various possibilities, and will present their findings to NASA Headquarters "in the January time frame," Green added.

http://www.space.com/31407-nasa-europa-mission-lander.html?cmpid=514648
 
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Jupiter's moon Europa is under a constant gravitational assault. As it orbits, Europa's icy surface heaves and falls with the pull of Jupiter's gravity, creating enough heat, scientists think, to support a global ocean beneath the moon's solid shell.

Now, experiments by geoscientists from Brown and Columbia universities suggest that this process, called tidal dissipation, could create far more heat in Europa's ice than scientists had previously assumed. The work could ultimately help researchers to better estimate the thickness of moon's outer shell.

The work is published in the June 1 issue of Earth and Planetary Science Letters.

The largest Jovian moons—Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto—were first discovered by Galileo in the early 1600s. When NASA sent spacecraft to Jupiter in the 1970s and 1990s, those moons proved to be full of surprises.

"[Scientists] had expected to see cold, dead places, but right away they were blown away by their striking surfaces," said Christine McCarthy, a faculty member at Columbia University who led this new research as a graduate student at Brown. "There was clearly some sort of tectonic activity—things moving around and cracking. There were also places on Europa that look like melt-through or mushy ice."

The only way to create enough heat for these active processes so far from the sun is through tidal dissipation. The effect, McCarthy says, is a bit like what happens when someone repeatedly bends a metal coat hange ...

http://phys.org/news/2016-04-europa-heaving-ice-scientists-thought.html
 
Europa moon 'spewing water jets'
By Jonathan AmosBBC Science Correspondent
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Image copyrightNASA
Image captionEuropa is one of the best search targets for extra-terrestrial life in the Solar System
Further evidence has been obtained to show that Jupiter's icy moon Europa throws jets of water out into space.

Scientists first reported the behaviour in 2013 using the Hubble telescope, but have now made a follow-up sighting.

It is significant because Europa, with its huge subsurface ocean of liquid water, is one of the most likely places to find microbial life beyond Earth.

Flying through the jets with an instrumented spacecraft would be an easy way to test the possibility.

One could even attempt to capture a sample of ejected material and bring it back to Earth for more detailed biological analysis.

The alternative - of trying to land on the moon and drill through perhaps tens of kilometres of ice to examine the ocean's water - would be immensely challenging.

Hubble made its latest identification by studying Europa as it passed in front of Jupiter.

The telescope looked in ultraviolet wavelengths to see if the giant planet's light was in any way being absorbed by material emanating from the moon's surface.

Ten times Hubble looked and on three of those occasions it spied what appeared to be dark "fingers" on the edge of Europa.

What is more, the location for these prominences looks very similar to the region where Hubble two years ago detected an excess of oxygen and hydrogen - the component parts of water.

Taken together, the new work and the earlier observations make a compelling case that H20 is being hurled - if only sporadically - into space from cracks in Europa's surface.

The suggestion is that the jets reach several hundred kilometres in height before then falling back on to Europa.

A similar phenomenon has already been seen up close at Enceladus, an icy moon of Saturn.

It has vast plumes of water vapour emanating from a series of fissures at its south pole.

The Cassini spacecraft, in orbit currently at Saturn, has even dived through the emissions to "taste" some of their chemistry. But the probe's instrumentation is not designed to detect the presence or activity of microbes. That would require a mission dedicated to the task.

The US space agency (Nasa) has just sent a satellite to Jupiter called Juno, but again this has no life-detection equipment onboard and, in any case, is not going anywhere near Europa in the course of its work.

Both Nasa and the European space agency do however have future missions in the planning stage that will visit Europa to make repeated flybys, and the determination that the moon has water jets will surely factor into the organisations' thinking.

Hubble has been working at the limit of its capabilities to see the moon's jets.

We should get further information when its bigger, more capable successor, the James Webb Space Telescope, is launched in 2018
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-37473617
 
It's an alien base with a very spectacular water feature :)
 
A spacecraft flying past Europa may be able to sample its colossal watery plumes – even if they stopped erupting weeks earlier. A new analysis suggests that jets spewing from Jupiter’s icy moon could produce complex, constantly shifting chemical patterns in its atmosphere, which we could use to figure out what is on, and even below, the surface.

Europa is thought to host a deep, salty ocean beneath an icy shell, and this ocean could be one of the best places to look for life in the solar system. In 2012, the Hubble Space Telescope spotted evidence that plumes of water vapourare vented from this subsurface sea into space.

That was good news for proposed missions to explore the moon and test its oceans for signs of life. Both NASA and the European Space Agency have missions in the works, targeted for launch in the early 2020s, that will fly past Europa.

”Those are free samples: we can just fly by and we can grab some of that material,” says Cynthia Phillips at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. “That’s our best way of understanding what’s going on – not just at Europa’s surface but, in the case of plume sampling, the subsurface – from orbit.”

One potential problem with this plan is that the plumes appear intermittent: Hubble didn’t see another sign of them until 2016. But now Ben Teolis and his colleagues at the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, Texas, have suggested a way to sample the plumes even if they aren’t active when a spacecraft gets there. ...

https://www.newscientist.com/articl...taste-europas-sea-by-sampling-its-atmosphere/
 
Just as long as they don't land...
 
NASA Thinks Alien Life on Jupiter’s Moon Europa is Likely
February 15, 2017 Brett Tingley

While Mars was the favorite candidate for alien life for decades, the rover-led search for life on Mars has turned up a disappointing lack of evidence. If there was ever life on Mars, it has likely been gone for millions of years. As a result, NASA has turned its attention instead to some of the moons of distant planets in our solar system.

Tantalizing geological evidence of subsurface oceans on Saturn’s moon Titan has some NASA scientists convinced that the conditions necessary to create and sustain alien life could be present on the frozen moon. More exciting is the news coming out of the study of Europa, a tiny ocean-covered moon of Jupiter. NASA has discovered a wealth of data about conditions on Europa that has some astronomers speculating that Europa’s cold, deep oceans might harbor life near the moon’s warm core.

This data has some NASA scientists so convinced of the possibility of life on Europa that the agency has released an official report outlining a new Europa lander mission. The 264-page report details how the new Europa Lander will be the first surface-based search for life since the Mars Viking missions of the 1970s:

The Europa Lander mission would be a pathfinder for characterizing the biological potential of Europa’s ocean through direct study of any chemical, geological, and possibly biological, signatures as expressed on, and just below, the surface of Europa. ...

http://mysteriousuniverse.org/2017/02/nasa-thinks-alien-life-on-jupiters-moon-europa-is-likely/
 
More news on the possibility of life on Europa. I've read so many SF stories where its a reality.

What appears to be a huge plume of water vapor has again been spotted emanating from Jupiter's icy moon Europa, boosting scientists' confidence that the phenomenon is real.

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope detected a 62-mile-high (100 kilometers) candidate plume near Europa's equator in February 2016, researchers and agency officials announced today (April 13).

The newly reported candidate is in the same location as a smaller one that Hubble saw back in March 2014. And that location is right in the middle of an unusually warm part of Europa's surface identified by NASA's Galileo Jupiter probe in the late 1990s. [Photos: Europa, Mysterious Icy Moon of Jupiter] ...

http://www.space.com/36464-jupiter-...ble.html?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social

Vid at link.
 
More evidence points to possibility of life on Europa. Vid at link.

Jupiter’s moon Europa features a warm subterranean ocean covered in ice.

For years, scientists have wondered if certain surface features are the result of plate tectonics, which, if true, would make Europa the only known place in the Solar System other than Earth to experience large, subduction-driven quakes. What’s more, the presence of tectonic activity would bolster the moon’s ability to harbor primitive life.

Europa has what it takes to support plate tectonics, according to new research published today in Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets. Using computer models, a team lead by Brown University planetary scientist Brandon Johnson was able to demonstrate the physical feasibility of icy plates driving deep into the icy interior in a processes similar to what’s seen on Earth. Excitingly, this same process could be delivering important minerals to the ocean below, heightening the moon’s status a potentially habitable world. ...

https://gizmodo.com/new-evidence-points-to-icy-plate-tectonics-on-europa-1820990213
 
Data from the Galileo probe is still keeping scientists busy.

Europa is venting water into space, old spacecraft data suggest
By Paul VoosenMay. 14, 2018 , 11:00 AM

The Galileo spacecraft may be dead, but it still has stories to tell. Fifteen years after the NASA probe burned up in Jupiter’s atmosphere, newly analyzed magnetic and plasma data from the mission have bolstered evidence that Europa, the planet’s ice-bound moon, is likely venting water into space.

Researchers have long believed that Europa is home to a vast saltwater ocean, trapped beneath a thick crust of ice, making the moon potentially habitable for life and a focus of upcoming robotic exploration. Over the past decade, scientists using the Hubble Space Telescope have made observations that seemed to support the notion that Jupiter is venting some of this water to space, much like Saturn’s moon Enceladus. But many other attempted observations have turned up dry.

So scientists instead returned to Galileo, which on 16 December 1997 made its closest approach to Europa, flying only 400 kilometers above its surface. Over the course of 5 minutes, spikes the spacecraft recorded with its magnetic and plasma sensors reflected the alterations that a veil of ejected water, from one or many vents, could cause in a region matching the telescope observations, they report today in Nature Astronomy. This indicates that a region of the moon potentially 1000 kilometers long could host such activity, though it is impossible to say whether this is a single plume or many, like the complex system of fractures and vents seen on Enceladus. Indeed, on its own, this evidence was too weak to tie to erupting water in a 2001 study describing it, the authors add, but it fits well with the Hubble and modeled evidence. ...

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018...ly_2018-05-14&et_rid=394299689&et_cid=2033053
 
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Landing might be a tad difficult.

Scientists have long wanted to explore Jupiter’s frozen moon, Europa, which is home to a vast subsurface ocean that makes it a promising home for extraterrestrial life. Recently, that desire has gained prominent financial backing from the U.S. Congress, which has directed NASA to start to build a robotic lander to follow the Europa Clipper, which will chart the moon from above.

But such a mission could be tricky. Probes have shown that Europa’s ice-bound surface is riven with fractures and ridges, and new work published today in Nature Geosciences suggests any robotic lander could face a nasty surprise, in the form of vast fields of ice spikes, each standing as tall as a semitruck is long.

Such spikes are created on Earth in the frigid tropical peaks of the Andes Mountains, where they are called “pentinentes,” for their resemblance to devout white-clad monks. First described by Charles Darwin, pentinentes are sculpted by the sun in frozen regions that experience no melt; instead, the fixed patterns of light cause the ice to directly vaporize, amplifying minute surface variations that result in small hills and shadowed hollows. These dark hollows absorb more sunlight than the bright peaks around them, vaporizing down further in a feedback loop. ...

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/201...ly_2018-10-08&et_rid=394299689&et_cid=2416592
 
Plumes of liquid water! Europa will make a good tourist attraction in future times.

Computer simulations of the plumes of liquid water that stream out of Jupiter's moon Europa show that the forthcoming space mission JUICE may offer an answer to the question as to whether the Jovian moon's subsurface ocean could harbour life. Hans Huybrighs comes to this conclusion in the doctoral thesis he has recently completed at the Max-Planck Institute of Solar System Physics and the Technical University Braunschweig, Germany, in collaboration with the Swedish Institute of Space Physics in Kiruna.

A deep ocean of liquid water is hidden under the icy surface of Jupiter's moon Europa. Life might have developed here, shielded from sunlight and curious observers from planet Earth. Peeping through the ice to find traces of this hypothetical life is easier said than done, especially when you realize that the ice could be several kilometres thick. In 2022 the European Space Agency (ESA) will launch its space mission JUpiter ICy moon Explorer (JUICE). The JUICE spacecraft will arrive at Jupiter and its icy moons in 2030 and on board will be the Particle Environment Package (PEP) developed at the Swedish Institute of Space Physics (IRF). New research shows that PEP, an instrument consisting of several particle detectors, will be able to "taste" the plume in different ways and shed some light on the contents of Europa's ocean.

Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2018-12-plumes-europa-extraterrestrial-ocean.html#jCp
 
A sketched (and perhaps 'sketchy' ... ) proposal for an automated probe to dig down to Europa's sea(s) has now been unveiled.

I'm thinking the bit about making this 'tunnelbot' nuclear powered or otherwise radioactive needs to be given more careful consideration.

Scientists Proposed a Nuclear 'Tunnelbot' to Hunt Life in Europa's Hidden Ocean
A group of scientists wants to send a nuclear-powered "tunnelbot" to Europa to blaze a path through the Jovian moon's thick shell of ice and search for life.

Europa, the fourth largest of Jupiter's 53 moons, is one of the best candidates in our solar system for hosting alien life. Researchers believe that its icy crust hides a liquid water ocean and that vents through that crust might deliver the necessary heat and chemical ingredients for life into that ocean.To peek beneath that thick veil of ice, researchers on the NASA Glenn Research COMPASS team (a group of scientists and engineers scattered around the country and tasked with solving problems for NASA) think they have come up with the tunnelbot.

On Friday (Dec. 14) at the 2018 meeting of the American Geophysical Union, the researchers presented a proposal for a "tunnelbot" that would use nuclear power to melt a path through Europa's shell, "carrying a payload that can search for… evidence for extant/extinct life." [Humanoid Robots to Flying Cars: 10 Coolest DARPA Projects]

The tunnelbot, the researchers reported, could use either an advanced nuclear reactor or some of NASA's radioactive "general-purpose heat bricks" to generate heat and power, though the radiation would present some design challenges. ...
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FULL STORY: https://www.livescience.com/64322-europa-life-nuclear-tunnelbot.html
 
EnolaGaia said:
and perhaps 'sketchy' ...
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Very....

EnolaGaia said:
an automated probe
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Exactly so. Because although we must accept that Voyager 1 can still communicate data back to the DSN over a distance of nearly 22 billion kilometres using 40+year old silicon/germanium tech, that would be a hell of a challenge for something burrowing deep under the surface of a planetoid.
 
Interest continues to focus on Europa as a likely place to search for extraterrestrial life within our solar system, and NASA is planning a probe to Europa in 2024.
Europa Could Actually Be The Best Place to Look For Alien Life in Our Solar System

The search for extraterrestrial life is increasingly homing in on the Solar System's ocean worlds, and there's new evidence that Jupiter's moon Europa should be the first port of call. According to new modelling, Europa's subsurface oceans should be able to support life.

The NASA team behind this research has also calculated that processes such as radioactive decay or tidal forces could have generated sufficient heat to allow for such liquid water on the icy moon, where surface temperatures never exceed about -140 degrees Celsius (-225 degrees Fahrenheit).

The findings have been presented at the 2020 Goldschmidt Conference, and are yet to be peer-reviewed, but they're just the latest in a long line of clues that implicate Europa as a possible life-bearing world. ...
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FULL STORY: https://www.sciencealert.com/europa...ce-in-the-solar-system-to-look-for-alien-life
 
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Nightside of Europa isn't so dark.

Jupiter’s icy moon Europa could give the word “moonlight” a whole new meaning. New lab experiments suggest the nightside of this moon glows in the dark.

Europa’s surface, thought to be mostly water ice laced with various salts, is continually bombarded with energetic electrons by Jupiter’s intense magnetic field (SN: 5/19/15). When researchers simulated that interaction in the lab by shooting electrons at salty ice samples, the ice glowed. The brightness of that glow depended on the kind of salt in the ice, researchers report online November 9 in Nature Astronomy.

If the same interaction on Europa creates this never-before-seen kind of moonlight, a future mission there, such as NASA’s planned Europa Clipper spacecraft, may be able to use this ice glow map Europa’s surface composition. That, in turn, could give insight into the salinity of the ocean thought to lurk under Europa’s icy crust (SN: 6/14/19). ...

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/jupiter-moon-light-europa-glow-dark-ice
 
Seeking evidence of life on Europa.

BEYOND MARS AND the asteroid belt, half a billion miles from the sun, the solar system might seem frigid, bleak, and lifeless.

But scientists believe there’s a chance tiny alien creatures could reside on a distant moon, and you might find them if you look in the right place. For many researchers, that place is Europa, below its thick, icy crust.

Planetary scientists are discovering more about Jupiter’s fourth-largest moon, one of Earth’s nearest ocean worlds—places like Saturn’s moons Titan and Enceladus that have bodies of salty water and other liquids that could be amenable to the emergence of life. They’re presenting new findings this week about Europa’s cracked surface, hidden ocean, and geological activity at the biggest annual planetary conference in the United States, organized by the American Astronomical Society, held virtually for the second year in a row. The research serves as a prelude to tantalizing opportunities for new observations by upcoming NASA and European Space Agency missions.

“Europa is fantastic. Of anywhere in the solar system, outside the Earth, it has the greatest potential, I think, for maintaining a habitable environment that could support microbial life,” says Michael Bland, a US Geological Survey space scientist in Flagstaff, Arizona. After modeling the moon’s dynamic, rocky interior, Bland believes the conditions on its deep seafloor could be amenable to life, according to new work that he and NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory scientist Catherine Elder presented at the conference on Monday.

https://www.wired.com/story/astronomers-get-ready-to-probe-europas-hidden-ocean-for-life/
 
ramonmercado said:
Seeking evidence of life on Europa.

BEYOND MARS AND the asteroid belt, half a billion miles from the sun, the solar system might seem frigid, bleak, and lifeless.

But scientists believe there’s a chance tiny alien creatures could reside on a distant moon, and you might find them if you look in the right place. For many researchers, that place is Europa, below its thick, icy crust.

Planetary scientists are discovering more about Jupiter’s fourth-largest moon, one of Earth’s nearest ocean worlds—places like Saturn’s moons Titan and Enceladus that have bodies of salty water and other liquids that could be amenable to the emergence of life. They’re presenting new findings this week about Europa’s cracked surface, hidden ocean, and geological activity at the biggest annual planetary conference in the United States, organized by the American Astronomical Society, held virtually for the second year in a row. The research serves as a prelude to tantalizing opportunities for new observations by upcoming NASA and European Space Agency missions.

“Europa is fantastic. Of anywhere in the solar system, outside the Earth, it has the greatest potential, I think, for maintaining a habitable environment that could support microbial life,” says Michael Bland, a US Geological Survey space scientist in Flagstaff, Arizona. After modeling the moon’s dynamic, rocky interior, Bland believes the conditions on its deep seafloor could be amenable to life, according to new work that he and NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory scientist Catherine Elder presented at the conference on Monday.

https://www.wired.com/story/astronomers-get-ready-to-probe-europas-hidden-ocean-for-life/
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Time to send up a space sub I think :)
 
Another study about water on Europa.

Shallow liquid water may be present on Jupiter’s moon Europa, data based on the Greenland ice sheet suggests.

Europa is a prime candidate for life in the Solar System, and its deep saltwater ocean has captivated scientists for decades.

The giant planet’s moon has been visited by the Voyager and Galileo spacecrafts, and data collected on these missions, together with modelling, indicates the potential presence of a liquid water ocean beneath a 20–30km thick ice shell.

If the mechanism we see in Greenland is how these things happen on Europa, it suggests there’s water everywhere. Understanding the structure of the ice shell and how it evolved is important for gaining an insight into the processes of the moon, researchers say. While the thickness of the icy shell makes sampling it a daunting prospect, increasing evidence reveals the ice shell may be less of a barrier and more of a dynamic system – and potentially good enough to support life in its own right.

Observations that captured the formation of a double ridge feature in Greenland suggest the ice shell of Europa may have an abundance of water pockets beneath similar features that are common on the surface.

Study senior author Dustin Schroeder, an associate professor of geophysics at Stanford University’s School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences (Stanford Earth), said: “Because it’s closer to the surface, where you get interesting chemicals from space, other moons and the volcanoes of Io, there’s a possibility that life has a shot if there are pockets of water in the shell.

“If the mechanism we see in Greenland is how these things happen on Europa, it suggests there’s water everywhere.”

https://www.irishexaminer.com/world/arid-40854566.html
 
Life on Europa? Searching for Carbon sources.

Carbon dioxide detected on Jupiter's moon Europa comes from the vast ocean beneath its icy shell, research using James Webb Space Telescope data indicated on Thursday, potentially bolstering hopes the hidden water could harbour life.

Scientists are confident there is a huge ocean of saltwater kilometers below Europa's ice-covered surface, making the moon a prime candidate for hosting extra-terrestrial life in our Solar System.

But determining whether this concealed ocean has the right chemical elements to support life has been difficult.

Carbon dioxide – one of the key building blocks of life – has been detected on Europa's surface, but whether it rose up from the ocean below remained an open question.

Aiming to find an answer, two US-led teams of researchers used data from the Webb telescope's near-infrared spectrometer to map CO2 on the surface of Europa, publishing their results in separate studies in the journal Science.

The most CO2 was in a 1,800 kilometre-wide (1,120 mile) area called Tara Regio, where there is a lot of "chaos terrain" with jagged ridges and cracks.

Exactly what creates chaos terrain is not well understood, but one theory is that warm water from the ocean rises up to melt the surface ice, which then re-freezes over time into new uneven crags.

The first study used the Webb data to look at whether the CO2 could have come from somewhere other than the ocean below – hitching a ride on a meteorite, for example.

Samantha Trumbo, a planetary scientist at Cornell University and the study's lead author, told AFP they concluded that the carbon was "ultimately derived from the interior, likely the internal ocean".

But the researchers could not rule out that the carbon came up from the planet's interior as rock-like carbonate minerals, which irradiation could then have broken apart to become CO2.

https://www.sciencealert.com/theres...carbon-on-the-surface-of-jupiters-moon-europa
 
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