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Liquid Ocean on Europa?
Ryan Finnin Day writes "A team from University of Arizona proposes an explanation for the arcs visible on the surface of Europa: a liquid sea with 98 foot tidal swells cracking the frozen surface. Also in the story, plans for a NASA probe in 2008 to use a laser altimeter to detect tidal swells. Read all about it."
When I was in college ( and then for some time after that ), I regularly read two newspapers known for their journalistic integrity; the two best on the opposite sides of the political spectrum. They were the Wall Street Journal, for the conservatives, and the Christian Science Monitor for the liberal side. Their paper is one of the best, and more reasonable, and they keep the editorials on the editorial page. And there's no religious proselytizing, either.
As to Europa, I also saw the Discovery show on the probe. I guess I never realized how likely life was there ( I thought it was frozen solid ), and I didn't know that there's actually a plan to send a probe. With the geothermal vents, I think the likelihood of life there is high. To think that in thirty years or less, we could be there checking for life really got me excited. That would be one of the discoveries of the epoch. God, I get excited just thinking about it.
Plus, just think if it's advanced past the microbial stage!
Oops, gotta go to the bathroom now; just made a mess.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. - Arthur C. Clarke
(we could be gods!)
Once, in the wilds of Afghanistan, we lost our corkscrew and had to live on food and water for a number of weeks.
Jupiter has a simply huge magnetic field that traps cosmic rays and energetic solar wind particles for very long periods of time. This is bad enough that our space hardware has an difficult time with it, and I have heard the speculation that human beings could never visit the region of Jupiter without taking a lethal dose.
:)
Could life evolve or take root (transported from Earth on tektites) in the leads of Europa given the extant conditions?
As far as life developing there... we don't know what forms are possible for life. We know OUR form of life would have a problem with the radiation, but that doesn't mean that any life would have those same problems. Perhaps a different form of life could have developed that actually somehow harnessed the radiation for energy, in some sort of "radiosynthesis". Maybe far-fetched, but there are bacteria here on Earth that can survive just about any radiation you throw at them. And that's just a modification in our structure of life.
I see way too much of that when people talk about life developing beyond Earth. They're too quick to project what is true about our life on any other possibilities.
Personally, I'd love to see a form of life that thought a planet like Venus was paradise and that Earth was uninhabitable.
---
"You know your god is man-made when he hates all the same people you do."
I think it is commonly accepted among most scientists that somewhere under the Europa ice caps is liquid water. How deep and how much water may be under dispute. The ice crust is very active, and breaking apart and moving about, which is really strong evidence for liquid H2O. Assuming there is an ocean, the probe must first get through this ice layer. Several ideas have been studied, such as drilling through, melting through (either electrically or with RTG), even slamming into the ice with high speed with intents to blast/melt through parts of it. It is not even known how thick the ice is, it could be hundreds of feet, or could be several km. That requires alot of energy to get past!
Then comes the question of having the probe transmit data back to earth. Does a surface relay remain on the surface to beam info back to earth, while the 'hydrobot' goes under the water? if so, how does the bot communicate with the surface station? Does it keep a tether, or use sonic modem to echo sonar through the ice, or some other method? If a tether is used, it could be potentially several km long!
Even if the probe magically makes it into the ocean, what instruments does it carry, and what measurements does it make? An underwater camera would require light, thus floodlights would be needed. Should sonar be used to map out the ocean bottom and/or the ice crust on top? All of these require power, which is a very limited resource on a space probe like this. Also, all of these require mass, which is a very limiting factor in both getting the payload into Earth and ultimately Europa orbit.
An perhaps the most critical requirement for uch a probe is in line with Star Trek's Prime Directive. Scientists want to make very sure they don't do anything to contaminate or disturb any native biosphere Europa has. Thus, RTG's are questionable. Even drilling through the ice can be a problem.
Scientists everywhere would love to send such a probe, however its plan of attack at Europa must be very meticuously (sp) thought out, because of the cost/time required just to get such a payload to Europa. There are plans for a preliminary Europa explorer, to provide much more detail than Galileo has. Most importantly, estimates of the surface ice thickness, to see if an ice penetrator is even possible.
For more information, check out the following URL which has a wealth of Europa-related web sites.
Of course, the movie version shows dancing spaceships better.
Why oh why can we not travel faster than the speed of light? I want my warp speed!!!
Seriously, NASA (and other space agencies around the world facing serious budget restraints) are going to have to do some fancy dancing to keep "us" (in the lower common denomenator type sense) interested in their exploration projects. I notice that it won't be 7 or 8 years before the laser spectrometer can partially confirms this theory (and then probably another 7 or 8 years before the next craft to "study it further" could conceivably arrive).
15 years. That's a long time to people becoming used to psuedo-instant gratification. The MTV generation can't keep focused on more than one thing for more than 10 seconds apparently (at least, that's what I assume based on those nauseating videos I happen see, anyone else feel seasick watching these music videos now?).
Hopefully, a proliferation of stories like this will generate and expand peoples interest in innerspace exploration and travel. NASA's servers (and the other space agencies around the world of course, let's not be USA-centric here) have an incredible amount of cool info. Maybe someday American's will elect representatives who think agencies like NASA are more important than making sure everyone can have their own personal semi-automatic rifle and direct the extra funding and resources accordingly.
Just a couple thoughts, probably offtopic, so moderate accordingly.
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M
This is good, good, good news.
The discovery of life on mars would be great, but it's possible (nay, probable) that this life would have the same origin as life on Earth.
Europa, however, is way to far away for this to be probable. It's still finitely possible, but that's all.
And, as we all know, life probably needs water. Life as we know it certainly does.
If there is water on Europa, there may be life. If there's life on Europa, as far as I'm concerned it's ubiquitous.
'"It sure would be exciting if we could go into that ocean if the ocean exists," says Dr. Kargel. "Who knows what we would find there? Maybe an organism."'
ALL THESE WORLDS ARE YOURS. EXCEPT EUROPA.
ATTEMPT NO LANDINGS THERE.
spawn_of_yog_sothoth
In the article, it states that the first life requires photosynthesis... which would not be able to penetrate more than 15 meters of the frozen crust.
On Earth, isn't it now believed that the first life was formed from "hot beds" on the ocean floors. Where magma broker through the Earth's crust and warmed the water. Obviously, absolutely no rays from the sun are able to penetrate miles down to the bottom of the ocean either.
How are they implying that this could not happen on Europa?
Yes. The concept of liquid water underneath Europan ice is not new. What's new in the article is the mention of tides. Jupiter's gravity makes the Bay of Fundy seem like small beans, tidally. Tidal forces will tend to make the oceans swell up and down underneath the ice. If the ice is thin enough it might crack and heave (as evidenced by the cracks on Europa).
Laser measurement is a good way to measure the altitude of the ice very precisely, to see just how much it moves up and down.
Sounds like something right out or Arthur C Clarke's 2010 and 2061. Basically he wrote about Europa having all the ingredients for life (specifically plenty of water) except for a nearby heat source (which is why the monolith turned Jupiter into a star). He wrote about some life forming at the bottom of this ocean next to sources of geothermal heat.
Cool.
Vidi, Vici, Veni
Liquid deposits beneath the surface of Europa have been posited for a considerable number of years. Easily since I was in middle school. The Christian Science Monitor is not exactly breaking scientific ground here.
Here is a link to a 1996 conference on this subject.
A similar story is running in Scientific American. You can see the table of contents for this month's issue here.
Points to Remember:
*it may not be water. Long-chain hydrocarbons have also been proposed. It could be from mineral oils to salt water, really.
*the only "new news" here is the theory proposed by these guys from the U. of Arizona that the cracks are consistent with tidal patterns. This is cool, but it is only confirming evidence for what people believed in the first place.
*Europa has strong volcanic activity, similar to its lava-covered sibling Io. This is due to Jupiter's insane gravitational pull. But Europa is colder than Io, because it's further out and has no atmosphere, so it has an icy crust. The idea is that (if it really is H20 ice) the volcanic activity has melted some of the ice. But, again, lots of stuff besides water freezes. All we know is that spectrogr aphically there is some kind of salt there.
I hope it does prove to be water, but let's not get carried away just yet.
-konstant
-konstant
Yes! We are all individuals! I'm not!
It's been a while for me too (about 7 years) but dave bowman found the third monolith on a moon orbiting saturn. The black dot was, of course, a huge monolith that took him through some kind of wormhole.
The story was changed for the movie, in which the third monolith was orbiting Jupiter. Probably to include Life on Europa in the next story. The books written after that followed the movie's storyline.
Vidi, Vici, Veni
The article goes into considerable detail about the effects of torsion from Jupiter and the other moons on Europa and how this generates tidal heat that can keep the sea liquid. The icy "shell" seems to rotate faster than the moon itself, with the sea acting as a kind of bearing. The most interesting evidence for me came from analysis of the Galileo probe's telemetry: subtle perturbations in its radio signal as it moves through its orbit suggests various properties of Europa's gravitational field, which in turn reveals the density at various levels, which ultimately is being used to estimate the thickness of the probable Europan sea, etc. All from a little distortion in the telemetry. Not bad.
The article is very good, and worth going by a news stand or library to look over if you get a chance.
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
I clicked on this article and then wondered why there was nothing about Linux then I realized..
It's not "Linux Oceans on Europa" rather:
LIQIUD Oceans on Europa.
Time for a new monitor.
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Since Europa is not in a perfectly circular orbit, and since Jupiter has 3 other "tidally significant" moons (i.e. big enough to matter on a macroscopic scale) you could get some killer tides. In fact, with Jupiter, the Sun, and Ganymede, Callisto, and Io all creating separate tidal patterns, you'd have five different high tides and ebb tides each day - day being the same as an orbit, of course, since we're locked - and those tides would all reinforce and cancel eachother out. 96 foot waves would probably require all five tides in sync - but that would happen several times a year, I think.
My head hurts...
-- The meek shall inherit the Earth. In very small plots, about 6 feet by 3.
The mission plans to determine the thickness of Europa's Ice and determine the existence of water. There's also a link on that page about the mission being a precursor to "hydrobots", underwater submaries that would melt their way through the Europan ice to explore underneath... Very Cool.
Well, the ice shell would not always have a source of light, or more importantly, a source of heat energy... While it is facing Jupiter, there is be some elecrtomagnetic intereference with the huge planet that will cause some heat to be released on Europa's surface... And we all know that it is warmer during the day than at night. So, it may be possible that when Europa is facing the sun and is close enough to Jupiter, parts of its surface may heat up enough so that a liquid sea underneath the crust could break through, if even just a little bit. And on a very large moon covered completely with water, 98 feet is just a little bit :)
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Matt Singerman
Matt Singerman
http://matt.vegan.net/
I can't cite anything off of the top of my head, but has anyone else read Clarke's 2069? The Europan ocean features prominently in that story.
Ok, I did a quick search on altavista. Here's what I came up with. I'm sure that you can find more if you're curious.
- Building a Probe for Europa
- Space Probe Finds Evidence of Ocean
- Pictures support theory of water on Europa
In re-reading the article, I see that the announcement is of a theory describing the mechanism which creates the patterns in the ice, not that Europa might have a liquid ocean, as the title of the slashdot post implied.--
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http://www.sciam.com/
Unfortunately, you can't read current articles on-line. Subscribe! It's a great mag.
One of the interesting bits in the article was that the Russian Vostok [2] outpost in Antartica is right on top of an under-the-ice lake, al-la Europa. They are going to field-test the Europa explorer equipment on it -- satellites and robots. Two robots are proposed; a "cryobot: and "hydrobot". The cryobot would look at the ice and melt a hole down into the water. The hydrobot would look at the water.
There's also an article at Nasa about life on Europa.
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The human in him is dying in order for the star child to be born. You could read it in all sorts of symbolic, metaphorical ways -- it's an incubation period, a gestation period, a man's death, a man's rebirth, the end of humanity, the rebirth of humanity, the birth of something far, far beyond humanity, finding religion, losing religion. That's what makes it such an amazing movie -- there is no one answer, only what you make of it, what makes sense to you.
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
According to this article at CNN, Scientists think they have liquid seas on Titan, a moon of Saturn. Not below ice like Europa, but above the surface. They hypothesize that the liquid are hydrocarbons.
This was also released 2 years ago (April 9, 1997)
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Not all Christians are fundamentalist boneheads whose faith is threatened by scientific observations.
I know that the Roman Catholic Church has no problem with evolution. A lot of the mellower Protestant denominations don't get ruffled about it.
I don't know how Christian Scientists feel about evolution. I do know their 'zine is highly respected for being impartial on international matters.
Everyone knows there's life on Europa. Those lines on the surface are from ice skating. I haven't seen a picture of it yet that didn't have a Figure-Zorb in it somewhere. I just hope that when they do send a probe they don't accidently have it arrive during the off-season, when everyone's over at South Molten Lead Beach on Venus.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
Christian Science news reporting is one of the best sources of news around. As a trained theologian, I have a VERY hard time with their theology, but their news services have proven themselves to be top notch for years. Very often you will find rather major events and stories that are only being reported by the CS group for the simple reason that they aren't provocative enough to sell in the mainstream press.
If there is a planetary ocean, then the cracks are what are called "leads"; Areas of either open water or thin ice between large ice sheets. These are the places where there would be enough light for some photosynthesis to occur. The question I have is; "What is the radiation environment at or near the surface of Europa's leads?"
Jupiter has a simply huge magnetic field that traps cosmic rays and energetic solar wind particles for very long periods of time. This is bad enough that our space hardware has an difficult time with it, and I have heard the speculation that human beings could never visit the region of Jupiter without taking a lethal dose.
Could life evolve or take root (transported from Earth on tektites) in the leads of Europa given the extant conditions?
Dog is my co-pilot.