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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."
Which would instantly freeze as soon as it hits the cold vacuum there.
WTH?
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.
They're already ahead of you :) Clipper will likely include the SUDA instrument for doing just that - roughly equivalent to Cassini's CDA
"You abandoned me! You abandoned my hatred!" "I... I have cuttlefish..."
I think you're confused. Plumes means "in space". The whole benefit of plumes is that you don't need to go under the ice at all, you can do flybies to collect ice particles, or have a lander observe and sample the plumes at the surface. The key is that it means a recent connection between the depths and the surface, and that would be huge for simplifying exploration.
We're nowhere near to being able to launching an ice boring / swimming probe. If I recall correctly the last thing I read on the subject, however, the most promising means for communicating with such a probe on an affordable mass budget was.... not communicating with it. Aka, having it fully autonomous - melting its way down, sampling/observing the ocean, then re-melting its way back to the surface - then and only then transmitting. The waiting period with no data would be stressful (as if it failed you'd never know why), but it could potentially be used on almost any icy solid body regardless of the ice thickness.
It's also possible that there's liquid water much closer to the surface than the global ocean. There are some inferred lakes at a depth of only a few kilometers, which is potentially short enough for a probe to maintain a fiber connection with the surface. And after JUICE and Clipper, we may well have found locations that are even shallower.
"You abandoned me! You abandoned my hatred!" "I... I have cuttlefish..."
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.
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
But this might be exactly the reason that we colonize Europa. If it wasn't for the ice fishing, why would anyone live in Minnesota?
Have gnu, will travel.
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
At this point if a probe could just taste the plumes, it might be able to identify evidence of organic chemistry, heck maybe even be able to identify the vacuum-desiccated remnants of living organisms. We're decades away from building a probe that could actually bore through even a few kilometers of ice, but being able to build probes that could land on the surface and analyze the deposits left over from plumes should be well within current technical capabilities.
At the moment Europa really is one of our best shots at identifying life on another world. Even if Europa has never developed anything more complex than bacteria, being able to sample its DNA, or even cooler, finding some other system of protein encoding and heredity would literally be one of the most significant scientific discoveries in history. Just having life there, would go a long way to confirming the belief of many scientists that all life needs to get kickstarted is liquid water, organic compounds and energy.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
The key is that it means a recent connection between the depths and the surface, and that would be huge for simplifying exploration.
I know what I'm about to write is armchair science, and I do look forward to reading the full peer-reviewed article, but it's a pretty tall assumption that the plumes have the same composition as the subsurface ocean. We have now seen plumes all over the place, even from the surface of comets. It seems a little too much like assuming what we want to hear is true to state that the plumes are coming directly from the oceans. Furthermore, even if they are, whatever process creates the plumes is unlikely to maintain the chemical composition in unaltered form. While it will certainly be important to study the plumes for their own sake, without evidence of the mechanism driving them, it's going to be a hard sell to say that such study would allow us to examine the subsurface oceans in anything but an indirect way.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
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.
If it wasn't for the ice fishing, why would anyone live in Minnesota? ....
Oh!? So the rumor that girls are hot there is a lie? Gosh
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
So the rumor that girls are hot there is a lie?
Can't tell under all that fleece.
Have gnu, will travel.
It's pretty limited what you can gather from individual grains captured at hypersonic velocities and analyzed with spacecraft-sized instruments. Certainly there was no "clear evidence of life" from Enceladus - although it showed us some very promising things about the potential habitability of its oceans.
Personally, I'm not a believer in the theory that wherever there's liquid water, there's life. First off, it'd make the Fermi paradox even worse, as water is bloody everywhere. Secondly, I think it's incredibly naive. The argument goes, wherever we find water on Earth, we find life, and whereever we don't, we don't, so we should expect that with the universe. But that says nothing about how life came about. Sure, LAWKI requires hydrogen, and water is the most convenient source of hydrogen, so obviously that's going to form the boundaries of where life has spread to. But where it's spread to says nothing about where it originated, or what it looked like when it did. We have no reason to think that the entire wet surface of Earth just spontaneously erupted into life; we certainly don't see anything resembling this in laboratory abiogenesis experiments. So what were the specific conditions that brought life about? I think it's a safe bet that they were rare. Quite likely no longer present on Earth, as Earth was a radically different place back then. And quite possibly rare in the universe as a whole. Little bursts of luck separated by great relativistic distances.
Indeed, bodies like Europa (and the many other bodies confirmed to or believed to have subsurface water in our solar system) should help answer these questions. I'm also exceedingly curious about what's gone on with alternative solvents and polymeric compounds, such as at the surface of Titan (I find the cyanide chemistry there fascinating, it seems to be extremely flexible).
"You abandoned me! You abandoned my hatred!" "I... I have cuttlefish..."
The cause is not the same reason as with comets (sublimation), Europa isn't on a sungrazing elliptical orbit. It's also not impact related, as the impact flash would have been seen, and the plumes wouldn't have been this frequent / long lasting.
"You abandoned me! You abandoned my hatred!" "I... I have cuttlefish..."
Yes. The thermal requirements are significant.
"You abandoned me! You abandoned my hatred!" "I... I have cuttlefish..."
Oh, c'mon!! 'Offtopic' my shiny!
That was *funny*!
In a thread and on a topic that desperately needed it before comas set in!
With no intent to belittle or harm anyone. With all the *other* kind of mean & hurtful jokes out there, I'm sure Snoop would get a chuckle here on jokingly assigning him 'comic-book-superhero powers of partying' status.
People need to chill on the hyper-sensitivity.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
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"