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posted by chromas on Monday March 25 2019, @02:58PM   Printer-friendly
from the click-on-the-sun-for-more dept.

foxnews.com/science/nasa-wants-to-explore-neptunes-moon-triton-solar-systems-coldest-object-may-have-ocean-harboring-alien-life

The mission would involve developing a new kind of spacecraft known as Trident.

It would fly to Triton and take photographs of the icy object, while also studying its atmosphere and chemical makeup for signs of an underground ocean.

[...]

Little is known about Triton, and the only images we have of the moon were captured by the Voyager 2 probe in 1989.

During that flyby, space boffins spotted geysers on Triton that spewed out nitrogen gas. Nasa earmarked it for further research.


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  • (Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday March 26 2019, @12:54AM (1 child)

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Tuesday March 26 2019, @12:54AM (#819825) Journal

    Objects at or beyond the frost line tend to have a lot of water. The objects in question [wikipedia.org] have a much higher proportion of water ice than Earth, possibly over 50%. Given enough internal or tidal heating, they can have liquid water oceans.

    Mass of Ceres [wikipedia.org] = 0.00015 Earths = 0.0128 Moons

    Ceres' oblateness is consistent with a differentiated body, a rocky core overlain with an icy mantle. This 100-kilometer-thick mantle (23%–28% of Ceres by mass; 50% by volume) contains up to 200 million cubic kilometers of water, which would be more than the amount of fresh water on Earth. This result is supported by the observations made by the Keck telescope in 2002 and by evolutionary modeling. Also, some characteristics of its surface and history (such as its distance from the Sun, which weakened solar radiation enough to allow some fairly low-freezing-point components to be incorporated during its formation), point to the presence of volatile materials in the interior of Ceres. It has been suggested that a remnant layer of liquid water may have survived to the present under a layer of ice.

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  • (Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday March 26 2019, @01:02AM

    by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday March 26 2019, @01:02AM (#819829) Journal

    Something in the 'liquid nitrogen' and 'liquid water' in close association is wrong. Just sayin.

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