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The study of two potential plume sites on Jupiter's moon Europa has shown a lack of expected hotspot signatures, unlike Enceladus where plumes have a very clear and obvious temperature signature, research by Planetary Science Institute Senior Scientist Julie Rathbun shows.
"We searched through the available Galileo thermal data at the locations proposed as the sites of potential plumes. Reanalysis of temperature data from the Galileo mission does not show anything special in the locations where plumes have possibly been observed. There are no hotspot signatures at either of the sites," Rathbun said. "This is surprising because the Enceladus plumes have a clear thermal signature at their site of origin, so this suggests that either the Europa plumes are very different, or the plumes are only occasional, or that they don't exist, or that their thermal signature is too small to have been detected by current data."
(Score: 5, Informative) by takyon on Wednesday October 24 2018, @03:46PM
NASA Finds Evidence of Water Plume on Europa [soylentnews.org]
The first evidence for Europa plumes came from Hubble rather than Galileo. As far as I can tell, the instruments on Cassini are somewhat more advanced than those on Galileo (compare Galileo's [wikipedia.org] Solid State Imager with Cassini's [wikipedia.org] Imaging Science Subsystem, for example). Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer will flyby Europa a couple of times, but more intensive observation of Europa would be done by Europa Clipper [wikipedia.org]. That mission doesn't have a firm launch date and has been tied up with the Space Launch System by Congress.
The ice shell on Enceladus is less thick [soylentnews.org] than that of Europa, which could be a result of Enceladus's smaller size (252 km radius vs. 1,561 km for Europa). That could help explain why the heat signatures on Europa don't correlate with plume sites, and why Europa doesn't appear to emit as many plumes.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]