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Jupiter's Moon Europa May Have Water Plumes That Rise Up About 125 Miles (npr.org)
NASA's Hubble Space Telescope released new images Monday, which will be published in The Astrophysicial Journal later this week, that show what appears to be plumes of water vapor erupting out of the icy surface of Jupiter's moon Europa. The discovery is especially intriguing as it means that the ocean below Europa's surface could be probed without having to drill through miles of ice. NPR reports: Europa is one of the most intriguing places in the solar system because it's thought to have a vast subterranean ocean with twice as much water as Earth's oceans. This saltwater ocean is a tempting target for astrobiologists who want to find places beyond Earth that could support life. The trouble with exploring this ocean is that the water is hidden beneath an icy crust that's miles thick. But if plumes are indeed erupting from Europa, a spacecraft could potentially fly through them and analyze their chemistry -- much like NASA's Cassini probe did recently when it sped close to Enceladus, a moon of Saturn that has small geysers. Scientists used Hubble to watch Europa's silhouette as the moon moved across Jupiter's bright background. They looked, in ultraviolet light, for signs of plumes coming from the moon's surface. They did this 10 separate times over a period of 15 months, and saw what could be plumes on three occasions. NASA says the plumes are estimated to rise up about 125 miles, and presumably material then rains back down onto Europa's surface. Using Hubble in a different way, scientists previously saw hints that salty water occasionally travels up to the moon's surface. In 2012, the telescope detected evidence of water vapor above Europa's south polar region, suggesting the existence of plumes that shoot out into space. The agency's Juno spacecraft is currently in orbit around Jupiter, but it isn't slated to take any observations of Europa.
Big black rock be damned, let's just land there and make the aliens pay for it!
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
" plumes of water vapor erupting out of the icy surface of Jupiter's moon Europa"
Clouds.
Which would instantly freeze as soon as it hits the cold vacuum there.
They try to fly a space craft through a plume only to have it taken down by a flying fish.
There are two planned missions to Jupiter will be looking at Europa that I know of, ESA's JUICE, and NASA's Europa Clipper. Is it too late to modify either of these to add an instrument for sampling these plumes?
Methinks it should be "astrophysical"...
WTH?
...to swim in the waters of Europa and take a PISS In it.
Even if they get it underneath all that ice, how are we going to communicate with the thing through miles of ice?
Jupiter's Moon Europa May Have Water Plumes That Rise Up About 125 Miles
Ugh. I know the country that made the telescope that saw the plumes still insists on using miles, but can't we at least agree to outlaw imperial measurements for anything to do with space?
Especially spacecraft design and fuelling...
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
1. Woosh
2. He said "Europans" as in people from Europa, not Europeans.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
We have already been warned!
All these worlds
Are yours except
Europa
Attempt no
Landing there
Nice finding, but not the big thing that NASA had been hinting at. They seem to do such thing distressingly often. Soon, nobody will take their press releases seriously - you can only cry wolf so many times.
1. It would mean that the subsurface ocean at Europa is connected to the surface - this makes the possibility of life below more likely, as chemicals/nutrients could be ionized at the surface and cycled through to the ocean below
2. It would mean that we could look for signs of life at Europa just by sending a probe into its orbit and collecting material from the geysers
An interesting discovery if true - Europa has a larger volume of water than Earth's oceans, and has been stable for billions of years. If there's nothing particular special about conditions on Earth, it's reasonable to expect life of some kind on Europa.
The JUICE mission is probably going to spend its time on the wrong objects in the Jovian system.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
"it means that the ocean below Europa's surface could be probed without having to drill through miles of ice"
Why bother, not like anyone is going to live there, we can ice fish in Minnesota all winter long.
Now we're going to see twice as much of that terrible meme "they found water on Mars but they can't fix the water problem on earth"
Isn't vacuum always cold? I fail to see how it could have a temperature above 0K.
Vacuum in itself has no temperature at all. "No temperature" is not the same as 0 Kelvin.
The temperature of something IN a vacuum is determined by the sources heating it and the infrared radiation outward from it. Initially, water exposed to vacuum will start to boil; the boiling will reduce the temperature (losing the heat of vaporization), and the lower temperature will freeze the water. So, in fact, it will boil and freeze at the same time, resulting in ice particles AND an expanding cloud of water vapor.
I got cooled to absolute zero, but I'm 0K now.
Cute.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
So instead of melting our own hole to Europa's ocean, we use on of these plume holes.
For simplicity sake, let's say the hole is perfectly smooth, no jiggered edges.
How the F*** do you go against that kind of pressure?
If the plume of water/slush ice is 100+ miles high, imagine the PSI!
You'd need something like a diving bell that stop the plume from spewing so that you can go down the hole.
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
This should greatly simplify the task of getting samples from under the surface.
Granted, it's still a matter of timing, but flying through a plume of water 125 mi high and taking samples has got to be easier than landing and taking them.
Hell, with a flyby, it might even be possible to grab some and bring it physically back to earth.
-Styopa
Well, all this talk about spouting geysers, JUICE and probes, I'd have thought we were talking about Uranus.
there are nuclear sharks attached to deadly lasers there.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt20...
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
Weren't we warned about landing on Europa?
Imagine the PSI 100 miles up after being slowed by wind resistance, gravity, etc. You just fly by in low orbit and pick some up.
"So instead of melting our own hole to Europa's ocean"
This is actually almost impossible to do. The energy required to melt the ice is extraordinary, plus you still have to pump the water out without it refreezing. Drilling is less energy intensive, but again you need antifreezes and lubricants and these all run the risk of polluting the very environment you are trying to sample.
Read about the difficulty of drilling to Lake Vostok in Antartica and you'll appreciate that there is no way we're going to do this on Europa any time soon.
You don't use the holes to get something inside.
You analyze the stuff that gets out instead ...
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Someone check my math, but I calculated 2025 km/hr to create a 125 mile plume at 1.315 m/s gravity.
Don't imagine. Calculate!
The surface gravity of Europa is [what] factor lower than that of Earth - where you've learned your reflexes.
Then you need to look at the spread of the plumes - which will giv you the ratio of the against-gravity velocity versus the expansion from diffusion of vapour.
Are you a mystic, or a scientist?
Wikipedia gives me the surface gravity as 0.13 g - less than 1 part in 7 of what you'd need on Earth (in nozzle psi pressure difference). Big difference to what you imagine. (Bigger, given that the gravity field will decay faster than you're used to on Earth. Europa being smaller than Earth.) ... complex. Ask a pipeline engineer why they like to de-gas fluids like crude oil. But I don't see any reason to expect large pressure differentials near the base of the fissure.
While there is no consensus on the thicknesss of Europa's stiff crust, a conservative guess-timate would be 10-20 km (from the spacing of fractures). For a 10 km thickness, a 1% exsolution of gasses (CO2, whatever) would froth the liquid for 8-9km of the ascent, reducing the back presure at the bottom of the fissure to - negligible. The complexities of 2-phase or 3-phase flow (gas-liquid, or gas-liquid-solid) and their pressure drops are
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"