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The Europa Clipper may be setting sail if NASA's latest plans go ahead.  The US space agency recently announced it was allocating funds to formulate a plan to robotically explore Jupiter's ice-covered moon.

The US space agency NASA, in its latest budget, has aside funds to robotically explore Jupiter’s moon Europa, often described as one of the solar system’s best bets for hosting alien life.

The agency's annual federal budget request of $17.5 billion (down by $1.2 billion from its 2010 peak) has set aside $15 million for “pre-formulation work” on a mission to the Jovian moon, with plans to make detailed observations and possibly sample its interior oceans.

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Scientists believe that underneath Europa’s icy exterior is a single, massive ocean that contains almost twice as much water as is found on Earth, kept liquid by the gravitational pull of Jupiter – a force that creates tidal swells 1,000 times stronger than those caused by our own Moon.

Discoveries of  diverse organisms including tube worms and shrimp found around the deep-sea hydrothermal vents known as ‘black smokers’ on Earth has led scientists to believe that sunlight may not be the prerequisite for life it was once thought to be.

Along with looking for life under the ice, observations made late last year by the Hubble telescope suggest that enormous jets of water some 200 kilometres tall (that’s twice as high as Earth’s atmosphere) are spurting from Europa’s southern pole.

This would mean that the Europa Clipper – a concept space probe that NASA been developing for just such a mission – could conceivably fly through these plumes of water vapor, collecting samples from Europa’s interior without having to face the cost and difficulty of landing on the surface.

NASA representatives stressed that all of this work is extremely preliminary.  The European Space Agency has also expressed much interest in Jupiter's moons.

"Europa is a very challenging mission operating in a really high radiation environment, and there's lots to do to prepare for it," the agency's chief financial officer Beth Robinson said to reporters on Tuesday. "We're looking for a launch some time in the mid-2020s.”

SOURCE  The Independent

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Using images from NASA’s Voyager Mission and the orbital Galileo Mission, researchers have created the first global geological map of Jupiter’s largest moon, Ganymede.

Scientists, have completed the first global geological map of Ganymede, Jupiter’s largest moon and the largest in the solar system.

With its varied terrain and possible underground ocean, Ganymede is considered a prime target in the search for habitable environments in the solar system, and the researchers hope this new map will aid in future exploration. The work, led by Geoffrey Collins, a Ph.D. graduate of Brown University now a professor at Wheaton College in Massachusetts, took years to complete. The map was published by the U.S. Geological Survey.

Image Source - U.S. Geological Survey

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Ganymede is the largest satellite of Jupiter, and its icy surface has been formed through a variety of impact cratering, tectonic, and possibly cryovolcanic processes. The history of Ganymede can be divided into three distinct phases: an early phase dominated by impact cratering and mixing of non-ice materials in the icy crust, a phase in the middle of its history marked by great tectonic upheaval, and a late quiescent phase characterized by a gradual drop in heat flow and further impact cratering.

Ganymede also was featured prominently in Arthur C. Clarke's 3001: The Final Odyssey.

“It is very rewarding to see the results of all of our efforts here at Brown come together into this integrated global compilation that will now be used to plan the next phase of scientific exploration of the Galilean satellites,” said Jim Head, the Scherck Distinguished Professor of Geological Sciences at Brown and one of the map’s co-authors.

The researchers combined images from the Voyager and Galileo spacecraft to put the map together. Voyager was the first mission to fly through the Jupiter satellite system and passed by the icy surface of Ganymede in 1979. Those first images revealed a complex surface, segmented and fractured into dark and light terrain. In 1995, the Galileo spacecraft was placed in orbit around Jupiter and began to return high-resolution images of the surface that help to understand many of the features seen at low-resolution by Voyager.

Head was a co-investigator on the Galileo’s Solid State Imaging (SSI) experiment. In that role, he and his team were responsible for planning the imaging sequences for Ganymede in order to identify and investigate the scientific targets of highest priority. The team worked for several years to obtain the data necessary to make the global map.

Geoffrey Collins was one of the graduate students looking at the data as it came in from Galileo. Wes Patterson and Louise Prockter, now at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, also started work on the project as graduate students at Brown. Robert Pappalardo, now at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab, was part of the team during postdoctoral studies at Brown.

“I’m so glad all that work has paid off in the form of this detailed global map,” Head said. “It is equally rewarding to see that the Brown team has now moved on to positions of leadership in the planetary exploration research community.”



SOURCE  Brown University

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