Space Briefs
A window into
Europa’s ocean
may be right
at the surface
Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech
If you could lick the surface of
Jupiter’s icy moon Europa, you
would actually be sampling a bit
of the ocean beneath. Mike Brown,
an astronomer at the California Institute of Technology, and Kevin
Hand from NASA’s Jet Propulsion
Laboratory, have detailed the strongest evidence yet that salty water
from the vast liquid ocean beneath
Europa’s frozen exterior actually
makes its way to the surface.
The finding, based on some of the
best data of its kind since NASA’s
Galileo mission (1989 to 2003) to
study Jupiter and its moons, suggests there is a chemical exchange
between the ocean and surface,
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making the ocean a richer chemical environment.
The exchange between the
ocean and the surface, Brown said,
“means that energy might be going into the ocean, which is important in terms of the possibilities for
life there. It also means that if you’d
like to know what’s in the ocean,
you can just go to the surface and
scrape some off.”
Europa’s ocean is thought to cover the moon’s whole globe and is
about 60 miles (100 kilometers) thick
under a thin ice shell. Since the days
of NASA’s Voyager and Galileo missions, scientists have debated the
composition of Europa’s surface.
The authors believe the composition of Europa’s ocean may closely
resemble the salty ocean of Earth.
Europa is considered a premier
target in the search for life beyond
Earth. A NASA-funded study team
led by JPL and the Johns Hopkins
University Applied Physics Laboratory, has been working with the
scientific community to identify options to explore Europa further.
“If we’ve learned anything about
life on Earth, it’s that where there’s
liquid water, there’s generally life,”
Hand said. “And of course our
ocean is a nice, salty ocean. Perhaps Europa’s salty ocean is also a
wonderful place for life.”
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