Astro Blog

By Kimberly M. S. Cartier , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: Europa Clipper launched at 12:06 pm EDT on 14 October from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Clipper successfully deployed its solar panels and communicated with mission control once in space. ...NASA’s Europa Clipper spacecraft...will head to Jupiter’s icy moon Europa and determine whether it’s a hospitable place for life. ...There will be 49 flybys of Europa to study the moon from pole to pole ...The craft is set to  arrive  at Jupiter in April 2030. ...Europa is one of Jupiter’s four Galilean moons. Past missions to the Jovian system discovered that Europa, along with fellow icy moons Ganymede and Callisto, have vast liquid water oceans sloshing around beneath icy shells. “ Ocean worlds  have been considered potentially habitable environments for a while,” said  Monica Vidaurri , a doctoral student in planetary modeling at Stanford University in California. “This is the first time we’re really dedicating a...

https://eos.org/research-spotlights/scientists-investigate-how-heat-rises-through-europas-ocean By Rebecca Owen , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: Europa, one of Jupiter’s many moons, may be capable of supporting life because its icy surface likely obscures a deep, salty ocean.  Europa’s ocean  is also in direct contact with its mantle rocks, and interactions between rock, water, and ice could provide energy to sustain life. Lemasquerier et al.  examined the way heating from Europa’s mantle could drive ocean circulation under the icy crust. The researchers modeled Europa’s ocean to further understand how heating patterns from deep inside the moon may affect the thickness of its icy surface. ...Mantle heat ...comes in two forms. Radiogenic heating is caused by the decay of radioactive materials in the mantle, and  tidal heating  is caused by the deformation Europa undergoes as it orbits Jupiter and experiences its strong gravitational pull. Tidal heating is uneven; it’s h...

https://eos.org/agu-news/oceans-of-opportunity By Caryl-Sue Micalizio , Eos/AGU.   Our solar system’s ocean worlds—planets and moons covered in ice-crusted oceans—are weird, wonderful, and ripe for exploration. [Here are a series of articles] Uranus: A Time to Boldly Go by Kimberly Cartier; Marine Science Goes to Space by Damond Benningfield on how ocean worlds are redefining what constitutes a habitable zone and how missions in development, like JUICE and Europa Clipper, are relying on terrestrial deep-sea scientific advances to look for oceanic activity that’s out of this world. ...older missions are still contributing to the discourse, as archival  Cassini data helped scientists identify phosphorus —the rarest element necessary for life as we know it—on Enceladus. ...Erik Klemetti explores Cryovolcanism’s Song of Ice and Fire .... 

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-05987-9 ]  By Frank Postberg ,  Yasuhito Sekine ,  Fabian Klenner ,  Christopher R. Glein ,  Zenghui Zou ,  Bernd Abel ,  Kento Furuya ,  Jon K. Hillier ,  Nozair Khawaja ,  Sascha Kempf ,  Lenz Noelle ,  Takuya Saito ,  Juergen Schmidt ,  Takazo Shibuya ,  Ralf Srama  &  Shuya Tan , Nature.  Excerpt: Saturn’s moon Enceladus harbours a global ice-covered water ocean 2 , 3 . The Cassini spacecraft investigated the composition of the ocean by analysis of material ejected into space by the moon’s cryovolcanic plume 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 . The analysis of salt-rich ice grains by Cassini’s Cosmic Dust Analyzer 10  enabled inference of major solutes in the ocean water (Na + , K + , Cl – , HCO 3 – , CO 3 2– ).... Here we present Cassini’s Cosmic Dust Analyzer mass spectra of ice grains emitted by Enceladus that show the presence of sodium phosp...