If water is a building block of life, what will we find on Europa?
I did a couple other posts that talked about the potential of Europa (see liquid water, support in congress, and alien ocean), but the response wasn’t all that great.
And I’m not all that sure why.
So let me try again.
What if I told you there was an ocean out there, beyond earth but still in our solar system that has been in existence for billions of years, that is perhaps ten times as deep as earth’s ocean and contains way more water than all the water on Earth … and it was beneath the shell of Jupiter’s moon Europa?
Well … that’s the theory and it sounds like we need to go check it out.
Why? Because it could blow up our current theories about where life could exist beyond our solar system.
Take a look at the video below and see if you don’t agree …
NASA’s Europa Mission May Land on Ocean-Harboring Moon
by Mike Wall, Space.com Senior Writer | September 08, 2015 07:00am ET
This remastered view of the Jupiter moon Europa is based on information from NASA’s Galileo mission of the 1990s. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SETI Institute NASA’s upcoming mission to Europa may actually touch down on the potentially life-harboring Jupiter moon.
“We are actively pursuing the possibility of a lander,” Robert Pappalardo, Europa project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, said last week …
The 1,900-mile-wide (3,100 kilometers) Europa is covered by an ice shell perhaps 50 miles (80 km) thick, but underneath this crust is thought to lie a huge ocean of liquid water 12 miles (20 km) deep or so.
…… Researchers know enough about Europa to surmise that its ocean has existed since the dawn of the solar system 4.5 billion years ago, giving putative lifeforms plenty of time to evolve, Hand explained. Modeling work about the 310-mile-wide (500 km) Enceladus is less mature, so it’s unclear how long the Saturn satellite has harbored its sea.
…… But enthusiasm about a possible Enceladus mission is high as well, especially because the Saturn moon’s powerful geysers offer a way to sample its ocean from afar. Indeed, NASA is considering a potential mission called Enceladus Life Finder (ELF) that would do just that.
The Europa flyby mission
While ELF remains a concept at this point — it’s competing with about two dozen other proposals to become the next mission in NASA’s low-cost Discovery Program — the Europa project is officially on the space agency’s books.
…… During these flybys, the spacecraft will scrutinize Europa using nine different science instruments, including high-resolution cameras, a heat detector and ice-penetrating radar. The mission’s observations should teach scientists a great deal about the moon’s surface composition, the nature of its underground ocean and its ability to support life as we know it, NASA officials have said. (Actively hunting for signs of life is not part of the current plan.)
“We actually don’t know what the surface of Europa looks like at the scale of this table, at the scale of a lander — if it’s smooth, if it’s incredibly rough, if it’s full of spikes,”Curt Niebur, Europa program scientist at NASA’s Washington headquarters, said during a June news conference that announced the mission’s science payload. “Without knowing what the surface even looks like, it’s difficult to design a lander that could survive.”
…… we should soon know more about the prospects of a lander blasting off with the Europa flyby probe relatively soon.
To Read the full article, please visit Space.com
The Cover Photo is credited to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and comes from the above video titled: Europa May Harbor Simple Life Forms
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