Jupiter's Moon Europa May Have Water Plumes That Rise Up About 125 Miles (npr.org) 96
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.
Make Earth great again (Score:5, Funny)
Big black rock be damned, let's just land there and make the aliens pay for it!
Re:Make Earth great again (Score:4, Funny)
And here I was only thinking it'd make a really spectacular view for a second honeymoon... but whenever I type "Europa" into booking.com, it just gives me offers on great deals for Barcelona and some little Greek island I never heard of before. Bummer.
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I think the radiation environment would probably make the honeymoon a bit of an experience. Possibly a terminal experience. But you never know - you might conceive Johnny-Two-Heads a nice hermaphrodite sibling with three arms.
Presumably its ice particles , not water vapour (Score:2)
Which would instantly freeze as soon as it hits the cold vacuum there.
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I was going to say it could still be liquid if the salt concentration was high enough, but even at 30% concentration, the freezing point is between -20 and -30 C.
But in a vacuum, water tends to boil, not freeze.
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I was going to say it could still be liquid if the salt concentration was high enough, but even at 30% concentration, the freezing point is between -20 and -30 C.
But in a vacuum, water tends to boil, not freeze.
So it could boil and freeze simultaneously? :-)
Re:Presumably its ice particles , not water vapour (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, that is possible: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triple_point
Not saying that's what happening here, though.
Re:Presumably its ice particles , not water vapour (Score:4, Informative)
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When water hits a vacuum, pressure drops far enough that it boils, not freezes.
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ice particles AND water vapour (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Nowhere in the universe is 0 K. Interstellar space is 2.7 K.
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The solar corona is, by all terrestrial measures, a really hard vacuum, and emits a radiation with a black-body equivalent temperature up in the order of a million degrees (Kelvin, or Celsius, it doesn't much matter). The heat capacity on the other hand, is pretty low, due to the density being pretty low.
You absorbed that one at your mother's tit, I guess. It's old enough ti have lichen on it. The joke, that is.
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1. Woosh
2. He said "Europans" as in people from Europa, not Europeans.
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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
Re:Too late to modify JUICE or The Europa Clipper? (Score:5, Informative)
They're already ahead of you [sciencedirect.com] :) Clipper will likely include the SUDA instrument for doing just that - roughly equivalent to Cassini's CDA
Wat (Score:3)
WTH?
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Maybe they can retarget it to make some closer observations of Europa now that there might be something interesting to look for.
Or maybe after spending 5 years traveling to Jupiter the spacecraft will be used for the scientific mission it was designed to do. Only science fiction fans would think looking for water on Europa is more important than the real science Juno is doing.
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Right. Because brief observations from an already present spacecraft that could help make critical design decisions about an upcoming multibillion dollar mission are an absurdity.
Look, we know Juno wasn't designed for this sort of mission and is not well equipped or positioned for it. But if researchers determine that its observations could help pinpoint more details of the plumes, then yes, they damn well should regardless of whether "tomhath at slashdot" considers that to be "real science" (apparently s
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But if researchers determine that its observations could help pinpoint more details of the plumes, then yes, they damn well should
There's no reason to assume the data they're collecting about Jupiter and it's atmosphere are so much less less important that it's worth the time, cost, and risk to make observations of Europa.
If there are plumes of water vapor coming from the surface of Europa they'll still be there ten years from now, a hundred years from now, and a thousand years from now.
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Look, we know Juno wasn't designed for this sort of mission and is not well equipped or positioned for it. But if researchers determine that its observations could help pinpoint more details of the plumes...
But they can't. Juno isn't a mission to look at Jupiter's moons, it's not in the right orbit to look at Jupiter's moons, it doesn't have instruments to look at Jupiter's moons. It's designed for looking at Jupiter and Jupiter's plasma and field environment.
https://www.nasa.gov/mission_p... [nasa.gov]
There's already a mission planned to investigate Europa: Europa clipper.
http://www.nasa.gov/press-rele... [nasa.gov]
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This is not correct. Juno is planned to do some limited observation/a> of the Galilean moons. It's a side mission, not central to it's focus (and Juno is anything but optimized for it), but it's one of those cases where, if you're there and you have the hardware... [planetary.org]
Concerning Europa (remember that this was before the recent news):
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This is not correct. Juno is planned to do some limited observation/a> of the Galilean moons. It's a side mission, not central to it's focus (and Juno is anything but optimized for it), but it's one of those cases where, if you're there and you have the hardware... [planetary.org]
Concerning Europa (remember that this was before the recent news):
The information you posted confirms how difficult it would be for Juno to make any meaningful observations of Europa's plumes. Why jeopardize the science Juno was designed for in mid-mission to look for water water on Europa, which was confirmed years ago, on the remote chance it might provide a piece of data that could allow a far-off future mission to confirm extraterrestrial life? Sorry, but only people with heads in a fictional sci-fi fantasy world willing to gamble everything for a childish dream of m
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Tomhath's "fake science" comment is flippant, but in fairness, discovering water outside of the Earth is not big news to anyone following the planetary missions for the last decade. NASA announcing yet another "discovery" of water somewhere and connecting it to potential extraterrestrial life is a public relations move as much as it is science. Juno's main mission to study Jupiter could very well be more scientifically valuable than diverting the Juno's limited fuel into a Europa fly-by to confirm water, wh
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" Only science fiction fans would think looking for water on Europa is more important than the real science Juno is doing."
On the contrary- SciFi fans know to "Attempt no landings there."
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Do you have a problem with English and/or logic? The quoted sentences make perfect sense. Which may be exceptional for Slashdot, but not really deserving of a WTH.
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Juno was launched before this discovery, and it is in a highly elliptical polar orbit that keeps it far away from any of the Jovian moons. Even if they wanted to completely scrap the rest of the science scheduled for Juno they don't have the option to modify its orbit enough to actually make a fly-by.
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Re:So how is it supposed to communicate? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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 be
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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 inc
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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
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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.
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Yes. The thermal requirements are significant.
Miles... (Score:5, Insightful)
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...
Re:Miles... (Score:5, Funny)
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...
Jupiter's Moon Europa May Have Water Plumes That Rise Up About 1.34473e-6 AU.
Better?
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No, that's not any better.
2.01e15 angstroms is much better.
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And orbit coordinates
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Screw your commie system, God save the Queen!
10 is a dumb base anyhow, not divisible by 3 or 4. The first tetrapods who crawled onto land had mathematically defective digits. They should have been BBQ'd and placed between bread instead.
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Don't (Score:3, Informative)
We have already been warned!
All these worlds
Are yours except
Europa
Attempt no
Landing there
NASA hype (Score:1)
2 big aspects to this, if true (Score:3)
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.
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Nothing you have written is provable or supported by any observations.
The experiment of life has been performed exactly once. Drawing wider conclusions from such a small sample size is ridiculous.
Uranus (Score:1)
Well, all this talk about spouting geysers, JUICE and probes, I'd have thought we were talking about Uranus.
Don't go to Europa (Score:2)
there are nuclear sharks attached to deadly lasers there.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt20... [imdb.com]
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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?
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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
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So the rumor that girls are hot there is a lie?
Can't tell under all that fleece.
Stupid meme (Score:2)
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"
How the F*** do you rideone of those holes down?!? (Score:2)
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.
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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.
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"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 [wikipedia.org] in Antartica and you'll appreciate that there is no way we're going to do thi
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You don't use the holes to get something inside.
You analyze the stuff that gets out instead ...
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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 ps
This is great news (Score:2)
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.
2010 (Score:2)
Weren't we warned about landing on Europa?