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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."
I once dated someone who was fully against the exploration, or colonization, of Mars because she feared that we were given this planet and we've made a mess of it. She argued that we had no right to go to another planet that didn't belong to us and alter it in any substantial way. After a few somewhat lenghty discussions trying to pin down exactly what her issue was about, I discovered that the she felt that GOD had given us this planet and not Mars, hence we shouldn't mess up God's plans with Mars by stomping all over it with our oversized space boots.
I didn't agree. I've got a feeling this argument, while maybe not coming from a religious perspective, has a lot of the same concepts built in. Guess what, we humans, as a race, own everything in the solar system. It is ours to do with as we see fit... other planets are being wasted until we make full use of them for humanity as a whole. Until and unless I'm shown proof of life on another planet, and it would probably have to be a somewhat substantially high order of life, I'm going to argue that it's our position to decide the destiny of every bit of metal, gas and rock that's floating in orbit around our sun.
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RumorsDaily
Not that seriously. The first Apollo mission found the moon to be sterile, but later Apollo missions found strep bacteria from previous missions.
Bacterial contamination is a real danger to life and to accurate science on Europa and lake Vostok. It is extremely difficult to keep a robotic probe from carrying contamination since modern electronics can't take the extreme heat needed to kill resilient strains (which since they're so resilient would make them even more harmful). Scientists have been putting more effort into trying to figure out how to explore Europa without contamination, but are having a tough time coming up with a solution.
As a graduate student in astrophysics (not planetary geology, which this would fall under), I think this is an overall good idea. (Agreed, the poster sounds a tad biased.)
There are a few points which I would like clarified by someone who is perhaps knowledgeable. For one, landing a spacecraft on Europa, where we have little knowledge of its atmospheric conditions, will be a formidable challenge. (We've lost many Mars-intended missions due to that.) How can we plan for that?
Secondly, I don't think it's known how deep the ice goes? Is there a plan for if the ice is a foot thick? How about 10 feet? How about 1000?
Next, can we still transmit a signal back if we have to take a probe that far underwater?
Notwithstanding a Europan shark eating the probe, I think there are some serious scientific reasons to be concerned about the search for life on one of the solar system's most likely candidates -- and we should ask ourselves if we're taking the best approach for a multi-hundred-million dollar mission?