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posted by chromas on Friday November 22 2019, @01:50PM   Printer-friendly

Forty years ago, a Voyager spacecraft snapped the first closeup images of Europa, one of Jupiter's 79 moons. These revealed brownish cracks slicing the moon's icy surface, which give Europa the look of a veiny eyeball. Missions to the outer solar system in the decades since have amassed enough additional information about Europa to make it a high-priority target of investigation in NASA's search for life.

What makes this moon so alluring is the possibility that it may possess all of the ingredients necessary for life. Scientists have evidence that one of these ingredients, liquid water, is present under the icy surface and may sometimes erupt into space in huge geysers. But no one has been able to confirm the presence of water in these plumes by directly measuring the water molecule itself. Now, an international research team led out of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, has detected the water vapor for the first time above Europa's surface. The team measured the vapor by peering at Europa through W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii, one of the world's biggest telescopes.

[...] In a study published today in the journal Nature Astronomy, [NASA planetary scientist Lucas] Paganini and his team reported that they detected enough water releasing from Europa (5,202 pounds, or 2,360 kilograms, per second) to fill an Olympic-size swimming pool within minutes. Yet, the scientists also found that the water appears infrequently, at least in amounts large enough to detect from Earth, said Paganini: "For me, the interesting thing about this work is not only the first direct detection of water above Europa, but also the lack thereof within the limits of our detection method."

Indeed, Paganini's team detected the faint yet distinct signal of water vapor just once throughout 17 nights of observations between 2016 and 2017. Looking at the moon from Keck Observatory, the scientists saw water molecules at Europa's leading hemisphere, or the side of the moon that's always facing in the direction of the moon's orbit around Jupiter. (Europa, like Earth's moon, is gravitationally locked to its host planet, so the leading hemisphere always faces the direction of the orbit, while the trailing hemisphere always faces in the opposite direction.)

They used Keck Observatory's Near-Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSPEC), which measures the chemical composition of planetary atmospheres through the infrared light they emit or absorb. Molecules such as water emit specific frequencies of infrared light as they interact with solar radiation.

More information: L. Paganini et al. A measurement of water vapour amid a largely quiescent environment on Europa[$], Nature Astronomy (2019). DOI: 10.1038/s41550-019-0933-6


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  • (Score: 2) by Hyperturtle on Saturday November 23 2019, @06:26PM (2 children)

    by Hyperturtle (2824) on Saturday November 23 2019, @06:26PM (#923906)

    I think you meant that if you said an exo-planet was found to be full of radio broadcasting SJWs, funding from the present US administration would be immediately found to launch a Space Force Defense Initiative to make sure that the extraterrestial SJW corruptive influences are squelched and dropped into a memory hole before the regular voting public is infected by whatever rambling manifestos such an civilzation may rant about into space.

    At least that's the gist I got out of your reply when I first read it! (then again, I had to read between the lines a little. Maybe I am just spaced?)

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  • (Score: 2) by takyon on Saturday November 23 2019, @08:43PM (1 child)

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Saturday November 23 2019, @08:43PM (#923954) Journal

    No radio broadcasts, just optical/infrared evidence of atmospheric "biosignatures", if not direct imaging of exoplanet continents filled with lush vegetation by the time we seriously drill into Europa or Enceladus (2040s?). We will have telescopes better than JWST before we attempt drilling into one of these icy oceans [wikipedia.org].

    I guess it would be easy to find life on Mars if there are literal insect fossils sitting on the surface, but I think we will end up having to drill deep there too.

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    • (Score: 2) by Hyperturtle on Monday November 25 2019, @02:37PM

      by Hyperturtle (2824) on Monday November 25 2019, @02:37PM (#924519)

      I have to admit I did not take that report seriously.

      I saw it two ways:

      1) Scientist is an expert in insects. He's going to see a bug anywhere. Maybe he is imagining what he wants to see.
      2) Scientist is an expert in insects. I would trust this scientist more than I would someone that claimed to be abducted by UFOs and is now considered by some to be an expert on all things science.

      However, I decided that just like the images of Jesus and J Edgar Hoover and bunny rabbits and so on that people find in things... this is just more of the same, except the person making the claim really is an expert in their field--which doesn't mean their expertise can cross disciplines without some compromises along the way--like how there is no food visible bearing a resemblance to what his identified insects could eat, or breathable atmosphere, or even regular temperatures that could support life that has a metabolism highly dependent on the temperature of its immediate surroundings (drying wings in the sun after crawling out of a larval stage exoskeleton/cocoon, etc...)

      It almost comes across as a sort of ink blot test; someone used to seeing a lot of something and used to identifying those things as part of their job or daily life... just might see more of it in an image of something else entirely, too.

      (Anyway that doesn't mean it wouldn't be cool if he was right! If there are any 'fossils' identified nearby the rover, maybe they can roll it over and take a close-up just to put any lingering doubts to rest.)