Astrobiology Magazine recently featured a very important study on Europa that could shape the future of robotic exploration at the Jovian moon. First author on the study was Krista Soderlund, a postdoc at the University of Texas at Austin. She and her colleagues (including Dr. Britney Schmidt, who we've featured previously) have shown that Europa's global, subsurface ocean could experience currents that circulate around the moon's equator.
Warm water carried by the currents freezes and is pushed up into the icy shell, possibly reaching the surface. This process creates visible chaos terrains at the surface, and could mean that samples of water from the ocean (and any signs of life it contains) might be accessible to robotic missions on the moon's surface.
Anyone interested in the search for life in the subsurface ocean of Europa should check it out.
Want to hear some cool science words? How's this: Soderlund's work focuses geophysical fluid dynamics, cryosphere physics, planetary physics, and magnetohydrodynamics!
