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Moon of Jupiter Prime Candidate For Alien Life After Water Blast Found (theguardian.com)
A NASA probe that explored Jupiter's moon Europa flew through a giant plume of water vapour that erupted from the icy surface and reached a hundred miles high, according to a fresh analysis of the spacecraft's data. An anonymous reader shares a The Guardian report: The discovery has cemented the view among some scientists that the Jovian moon, one of four first spotted by the Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei in 1610, is the most promising place in the solar system to hunt for alien life. If such geysers are common on Europa, NASA and European Space Agency (ESA) missions that are already in the pipeline could fly through and look for signs of life in the brine, which comes from a vast subsurface ocean containing twice as much water as all the oceans on Earth.
NASA's Galileo spacecraft spent eight years in orbit around Jupiter and made its closest pass over Europa, a moon about the size of our own, on 16 December 1997. As the probe dropped beneath an altitude of 250 miles, its sensors twitched with unexpected signals that scientists were unable to explain at the time. Now, in a new study, the researchers describe how they went back to the Galileo data after grainy images beamed home from the Hubble space telescope in 2016 showed what appeared to be plumes of water blasting from Europa's surface.
NASA's Galileo spacecraft spent eight years in orbit around Jupiter and made its closest pass over Europa, a moon about the size of our own, on 16 December 1997. As the probe dropped beneath an altitude of 250 miles, its sensors twitched with unexpected signals that scientists were unable to explain at the time. Now, in a new study, the researchers describe how they went back to the Galileo data after grainy images beamed home from the Hubble space telescope in 2016 showed what appeared to be plumes of water blasting from Europa's surface.
I understand the concern. That we'll lose vital information about a real-world real-time test environment lasting billions of years and the origins of life and abiogenesis are hella interesting and we want to study pristine environments prior to fucking shit up and making a mess.
But once a place is established as being sterile, can we please make an effort to establish an ecosystem off-world? We're one crazy motherfucker away from a civilization ending event, possibly a human-extinction event, and we might not get another chance to spread life across the solar system. And we ARE currently in another mass extinction event. We, collectively, as in all known life-forms. It's like banking a backup. Roaches on Earth might one day evolve another race that can launch rockets, but if there's TWO or more sets of roaches, the odds of building up a civilization are that much better. How about a dead man's switch? Send up a sealed box of dormant extreamophiles wrapped in thermite. If we don't send a signal or recover it in 100 years, it opens up.
And what is it going to take to convince people that a planet is sterile? There's no lush jungles around the canals on Mars and there's no moon-men eating cheese. At what point is it fair game to try and seed planets?
People rarely think about the long-term goals.
Imagine this: plume of water vapor erupts from deep within Europa, hundreds of miles high. Most of that never leaves the vicinity of Jupiter, but a little of it manages to escape, freezes, and floats around the solar system for a while.. eventually coming into the gravitational influence of a young Earth. It makes it through the atmosphere, eventually finding it's way into Earths' oceans, carrying the seeds of primitive life..