#jupiter moon

Blog#442

Saturday, October 5th, 2024.

Welcome back,

Life is abundant on Earth, but we haven’t yet found it anywhere else in the universe. How do we search for life beyond our home planet? Scientists say we should look for three key ingredients that make life possible: liquid water, chemistry, and energy. Also, life takes time to develop. We should look for life on worlds where sufficient time has passed for life to get started.

Jupiter’s icy moon Europa may have these essential ingredients and is as old as Earth. NASA is sending the Europa Clipper spacecraft to conduct a detailed exploration of Europa and investigate whether the icy moon, with its subsurface ocean, has the capability to support life. Understanding Europa’s habitability will help scientists better understand the potential for finding life beyond our planet and guide us in our search.

Astrobiology is the study of the origin, evolution, and distribution of life in the universe.

This multidisciplinary field investigates the extremes of life on Earth to inform its search for life in the universe. It encompasses characterizing habitable environments in preparation to search for life.

Liquid water tops the list of ingredients for life, and Europa has lots of it. Scientists think Europa has a salty ocean beneath its icy crust with about twice as much water than all of Earth's oceans combined. Water dissolves nutrients for organisms to eat, transports important chemicals within living cells, supports metabolism, and allows those cells to get rid of waste. Scientists are confident there's a rocky seafloor at the bottom of Europa’s ocean.

Hydrothermal activity could possibly supply chemical nutrients that could support living organisms.

The best evidence that there's an ocean at Europa was gathered by NASA's Galileo spacecraft, which orbited Jupiter from 1995 to 2003. While Europa has no magnetic field of its own, when the Galileo spacecraft made 12 close flybys of Europa, its magnetometer detected a magnetic field within Europa as Jupiter's powerful magnetic field swept past the moon. Scientists think the most likely cause of this magnetic signature is a global ocean of salty water.

Europa's bright, icy surface is unlike anything seen on Earth. It’s the smoothest body in the solar system, with few towering mountains or deep basins. Ridges and grooves crisscross the surface, breaking up the landscape. Many of these features coincide with long, curving streaks that are dark and reddish in color – some stretching across the surface in great arcs over 600 miles (1,000 kilometers) long. Elsewhere, domes, pits, and jumbles of icy blocks hint that warm ice may be rising from deep below.

Along with water, life as we know it also needs certain chemical elements – the building blocks of life – including carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, and sulfur. These elements are common in the universe and make up 98% of living matter on Earth by combining to form organic molecules essential to life.

Scientists think these elements were likely incorporated into Europa as the moon formed. Later, asteroids and comets collided with the moon and may have left more organic materials.

The third ingredient for life is energy. All lifeforms need energy to survive. On Earth, most of that energy comes from the Sun. For example, plants grow and thrive through photosynthesis, a process that converts sunlight into energy. The energy is transferred to humans, animals, and other organisms when the plants are eaten.

But the type of life that might inhabit Europa likely would be powered purely by chemical reactions instead of by photosynthesis, because any life at Europa would exist beneath the ice, where there is no sunlight.

Europa's surface is blasted by radiation from Jupiter. That's a bad thing for life on the surface – it couldn't survive. But the radiation may create fuel for life in an ocean below the surface.

The radiation splits apart water molecules (H2O, made of oxygen and hydrogen) in Europa's extremely tenuous atmosphere. The hydrogen floats away and much of the oxygen stays behind and may bind to other elements. Oxygen is a very reactive element, which means it could potentially be used in chemical reactions that release energy. If the oxygen somehow makes its way to the ocean, it could react with other chemicals to possibly provide chemical energy for microbial life.

Originally published on https://europa.nasa.gov

COMING UP!!

(Wednesday, October 9th, 2024)

Early Morning Skies...

The new video I researched and co-wrote with the Hoog team is up. It covers the history, construction, launch, and cornucopia of problems that the Galileo mission encountered. It’s a fun time

Research was a fairly intense process and while I pull from a lot sources, a fair bit was based on Mission to Jupiter by Michael Meltzer. It is THE book about Galileo and I can’t recommend it enough. For this project I read through this book and dissected it about four times

Galileo will always have a special place in my heart. It’s a very long, very good story. Galileo is really the little satellite that could even though it was plagued by problems

Boom!! There goes another one! One of Jupiters many moons, Io, is about the size of Earth's moon, but its surface is full of volcanic activity. This is due to gravitational flexing by Jupiter and other moons. The process heats the moons interior, covering the surface with volcanoes. The featured image is from NASA’s robotic June spacecrafts fly by last week, passing within 12,000 kilometers above the dangerously active world. The surface of Io is covered with sulfur and frozen sulfur dioxide, making it appear yellow, orange and brown. As hoped, Juno flew by just as a volcano was erupting -- with its faint plume visible near the top of the featured image. Studying Io's volcanoes and plumes helps scientists better understand how Jupiter's complex system of moons, rings, and auroras interact. Juno is scheduled to make two flybys of Io during the coming months that are almost 10 times closer: one in December and another in February 2024.

jupiter's moons