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In this Discussion
- bealema November 2011
- Champagnerocker November 2011
- ian997911 June 2012
- John_Brady November 2011
- Stephen June 2012
The "Great lakes" of Europa
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Important findings regarding the chances of extraterrestrial life on Jupiter's moon Europa, my write up...http://astronomycentral.co.uk/shallow-liquid-water-found-on-jupiters-icy-moon-europa
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i reckon theres some sort of 'water creatures' or some bacteria like things haha :) great explanation matt hahaha :) you get me ? :D great link :)
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I'm a bit confused by this as a news story [i saw this reported elsewhere this week too] I thought we already knew that Europa was made up of ice floating on liquid water or did we just think that?
Plus the Gallileo probe finished years ago, have they just got one lazy part time guy on his own looking at the misson data every other friday! Are there any more plans in the pipeline to send probes to the Jupiter system? If we can land on Titan then we should be able to manage Europa as well.
Hopefully the sky will remain clear for another couple of hours so i can see a Europa crossing Jupiter from midnight tonight. -
Yes Champagnerocker it has been known for a long time that Europa has a subsurface ocean, below around 100 miles of ice. But this is the first evidence yet that there's actually huge bodies of water, underground lakes, near to the surface. This points more in the direction of extraterrestrial life being able to exist there. Plus that water is a bit easier to get to if probes ever go there.
Ha ha yeah, they must have just the one Nasa guy doing his work whenever he gets a minute ! Apparantly Galileo got decades worth of data...okaaay then :-)
There's been all kinds of ideas, to get at the Europa water, ice drilling probes, probes that melt through the ice etc. But nothing really definite yet I don't think.
Yes Bealema, they probably expect bacteria like life forms, if there's anything not of this Earth living there. -
:) sounds exciting :)
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well juno is on its way as we speak to study how jupiter formed. it wont arive untill 2016. next up is J.U.I.C.E. (juipiter icy moon explorer) it will explore the jovian sysem and in particular study ganymede, callisto and europa because of their water content. this mission has a planned launch in 2022 and wouldnt arive untill 2030. no missions have been planned to land on any of the moons yet which i find very disappointing. it could be near the end of the century before a lander actually even gets there at this rate. propulsion needs to be stepped up and the costs driven down otherwise its going to be a slow process.
