Melting Europa

amigoro writes "After having contaminated Earth's Oceans, it seems that there are plans to send a probe drilling through Europa's ice sheet and explore the purported ocean below the crust. The plan seems to be to find Life there. But I wonder how long the time lag will be between the probe finding life, and a leak in the radioactive heater wiping all of it out."

Comments

Europa in Radiation Belts?

[Smitty825]

Isn't Europa in Jupiter's radiation belts? In otherwords, a tiny amount of radiation released from a probe would probably be nothing compared to what the "ocean" experiences everyday? (I could be way off base, though)

Europa is already highly radioactive!

[onyxruby]

http://www.nas.nasa.gov/Main/Features/2000/Fall/sp ace_pic1.html

Europa is already highly radioactive. It's around 19 Mrads thanks to this thing we call Jupiter. Saying that a radioactive probe could potentialy destroy any life already there is akin to saying that my bottle of water could kill off life in the pacific. Its people like the poster of this story that the website about "dihydrogen monoxide" is meant to catch.

Re:But the point is...?

[orac2]

we have little knowledge of its atmospheric conditions

Actually, we have very good knowledge of Europa's atmospheric conditions, i.e. it doesn't have one (well, no more so than our own moon). On a side note, the vast majority of failed Mars missions were lost not because of the difficulties of navigating the atmosphere but because of things like a rocket motor blowing up, or an incorrect course adjustment, these problems occuring well before any martian atmosphere was encountered.

Estimates for the thickness of the ice on Europa vary, but think kilometers, not meters, except for a few areas, like the so-called Conemara cliffs region, were it could be much thiner, possibly due to a local hot spot.