Europa, obviously.
I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Europa has biology deep within it, and I’d like to see it explored…with the reservation that it’s not clear to me how to get at it. A spacecraft that has deep tunnel drilling capabilities and can turn into an ROV? Something that just scratches at the surface would be a good preliminary, but all the cool stuff is probably happening way, way down.
what kinds of evidence for life below would be found at the surface is the question I guess
ashleybell, Gorton’s of Gloucester dinners, that’s what you’d find. Per a Tyson lecture, you’d have cracks appearing regularly in the ice, even as thick as it is. Water would well up. The contents of the water would go with it. It would immediately freeze out, healing the rifts. You’d eat like a champion, as long as you brought an ax and a microwave. Oh, and some lemon.
I still have my hopes up for floating life on Jupiter à la Carl Sagan’s vision.
Deep rifts!
Would Jupiter’s proximity make a Europa landing harder? (Assuming Dave Bowman allows it, that is)
Floating life
Alas, no. The atmospheric gases circulate not only laterally, but also vertically. Anything in the atmosphere will experience freezing cold in the Jovian stratosphere, then get sucked down to extreme heat in the very dense lower atmosphere, above the literally bottomless ocean of liquid hydrogen.
…and on the surfaces of Uranus and Neptune, you not only have crushing atmospheric pressures, but are isolated from any non-ice substances by 10.000 km of solid ice. If you want metals or silica, you have to get it from the moons. And life needs those substances.
— — —-
As for the oceans inside various moons, you can expect the water to be too salt.
All these worlds are yours except Europa. Attempt no landing there. Use them together. Use them in peace.
HAL 9000
#6, birgerjohansson
I fear you may be extrapolating from a sample size of one.
What would you need to make a ribozyme, just out of interest?
birgerjohansson:
How salty? We have halophiles right here on Earth.
Did anyone else see the Morpheus meme at this quote?
“What if I told you that there is an ocean, out there, beyond earth; an ocean in our solar system that has been in existence for billions of years?”
Oh man, I would so click ‘like’ on that meme.
Also, although I’ve already voted my SQUEE to propostion: land on Europa on Ophelia’s post, I would like to repeat it here.
Yes. We have to go. We need to go. Europa is life. Europa is hope. Do it, do it, do it. Do it now! #fanboy
@Moggie, 4
Well, it’d be easier than landing on a planet orbiting a back hole, and we’ve seen that that’s possible now! (But no, it shouldn’t make it significantly harder… in some ways, it may actually make it easier than the landing on churyumov-gerasimenko, since you’ve got a much larger gravitational target to aim for in the beginning, and then it’s just a matter of tuning your orbit around Jupiter to give you an intercept with Europa.)
Which science fiction story was it that had Jupiter being ignited to act as a sun to its own (comparatively) “miniature” solar system … (with Europa playing the role of Earth)?
It’s not necessary to drill 20km under the ice, or indeed even to land. Europa has water geysers. Just fly by close enough and the thin outer atmosphere will be littered with bits of organics spewed out in the geysers.
@elronxenu, 12
Umm, how, exactly, do you propose we plant a flag there if we do not land, hmm?
Now I feel like re-watching Europa Report
opposablethumbs #11
Not quite what you said but close
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_World_Out_of_Time
@me, 10
It’s probably also worth mentioning that, since Europa has a greater mass than Churyumov-Gerasimenko, the landing itself may technically be riskier, but it’ll be a lot easier to keep any lander on Europa, and at it’s intended landing site. Philae only weighs something like a few pounds (too lazy to math it out today) on the comet, which is why it had things like the harpoon anchor and a thruster on its top – to keep it from bouncing off and floating away.
opposablethumbs:
2010: Odyssey Two.
re @11:
A.C.Clarke, 2010, the monoliths compressed Jupiter enough for ignition. HAL then radios: All These Worlds Are Yours, Except Europa, Attempt No Landing There.
Seems we’re way behind schedule :-D
—
Europa Report, YESSSSS. That film just blew me away. It was so realistic, I kept thinking it was a documentary, not Science FICTION.
If the place has “symmetriads” like the Solaris ocean, stay away from them! And be prepared for simulacra of dead wives, and other stuff mined from your memories of traumatic events…
— — — —
Moggie, I do not know how salty the Europa ocean is. I know that Earth’s ocean could rid iteslf from salt (see “evaporites”) because it is at the surface. I don’t know if ordinary eukaryotes would be able to survive if the ocean had retained all the salt.
In regard to extremophiles, the problem is, they are not eukaryotes.
It’ll be amazing if we finally get to meet some Europeans!
It’s time to get Admiral Harriman Nelson on the mission design.
Come on! Everyone knows that if you want to drill a moon, you send Bruce Willis! (otherwise for a staged modular vehicle it should be a case of solving engineering problems – launch, travel to Europa, orbit, landing, drilling, establishing a connection between surface and underwater and finally – detachable autonomous, auto-returning submersible probe! Yey!)
With scientific exploration seemingly waning I hope to live long enough, not to see people travel to Mars, but to see what is under the ice on Europa. And if life is found, to then live long enough to see the way that news impacts human society. That is to see if it has a profound effect on how we see our planet and our place in the universe, or whether nothing changes at all.
Culberson. (R-Tex) is behind funding NASA for future mission, by people. But not giving any hints to the nature of such missions. But JPL’s release, so quickly after Culberson’s statement looks like a massive hint (to me). To me the more astounding revelation is NOT the mission goal of Europa, but that a Repub is in actual support of throwing dollarbills at Jupiter (their words, not mine).
[Culberson’s district include Johnson Space Center, so quite predictable he would be behind making dollars flow into that employer. But Heck, ends justify means, or sumthin]
#23, nomadiq:
It isn’t all bad. We’ve got Dawn visiting Ceres and New Horizons visiting Pluto next year
Admittedly, it gets a little quieter after that (Akatsuke, maybe? Juno? Bit less awesome than the above, though), but it is still pretty impressive given that there appear to be only two organisations capable of operating serious, large scale interplanetary missions, and one of them is apparently funded by people who hate science and the other is funded by people who hate each other.
I guess there is a bit of a gap before the newer big national agencies get more interesting things going. I note the Indians have just put a spacecraft in orbit around Mars, which is no mean feat. I guess that sort of speculation falls into the ‘might not live long enough to see’ category though.
What about Ganymede? I read it has a layered ice-water-ice ocean, could the scraping of ice sheets against one another circulate nutrients, mirroring the runoff of nutrients from the land into the sea on Earth? Also Neptune, they are predominately composed of water, and while its terribly cold at the surface, there is nothing between the water/ammonia/methane mantle and the core, which is hot, could there be a zone somewhere deep in Neptune’s interior that is congenial for life? (Obviously such a region would be so far into Neptune’s interior that reaching it would be almost unimaginably difficult, even before one considers the problems of landing on the surface of Neptune)
Enceladus might be a better target. Like Europa it has a subsurface ocean, but it spews some of the contents through surface cracks, so it could be sampled without landing, or from the surface (much of it falls back as snow). Europa may also produce plumes from its subsurface ocean, but that’s not certain.
Enceladus also has a much more benign radiation environment compared to Europa. The radiation at Europa is so intense that most recent probe proposals don’t go in orbit around it, but instead do multiple flybys. I’m not sure if a surface probe could last very long on Europa, at least not with the tech we currently have. By contrast, Enceladus has much lower radiation in its environs, and an orbiter could just circle around through its plumes with a fish net.
The mission they were floating circa 1999-01 (I did two years at NASA then) was to land, melt through the ice, 1-10km of it, then swim around collecting data, then either bore back up to the surface or somehow else send the data home.
There were lots of unknowns, such as whether there even was an ocean — it was suspected but not proven yet then. Power wasn’t mentioned in the slides I saw, but it was clear that the only way to melt its way through the ice and have power under the ice would be nuclear; you just weren’t really allowed to say the N word right then. Data return they weren’t sure about — could you leave a radio dish on the surface, then spool out a long enough cord; or would the ice be thin enough to be able just to radio back; or could you store it all, bore back up to the surface, call home, then dive back for another go? The worst bit was that the autonomous bits were all just sci-fi at the time.
Yes please. The European Space Agency landed (three times) on a comet. NASA should up them by going to Europa.
One of the things a lander could do would be a seismographic analysis to get a better idea of the internal structure of the moon. That, combined with chemical analysis of surface material, would tell scientists what we’re dealing with and paving the way for more ambitious exploration.
Naked Bunny with a Whip: I was thinking Admiral Ackbar…..
Scientists Find Evidence of ‘Diving’ Tectonic Plates on Jupiter’s Moon Europa | NASA — evidence of subduction zones there. So Europa likely has continental drift, though without Earthlike continents.
That could help explain why Europa’s surface is almost devoid of impact craters. Like the Earth, it does lots of resurfacing, destroying evidence of impacts.
This article has more information on the search for life, and the plans for future missions in addition to the awesome video. NASA Unveils Most Amazing Photos of Europa
The great thickness debate: Ice shell thickness models for Europa and comparisons with estimates based on flexure at ridges
Different methods have given different results:
— Overall: 0.1 – 30 km
— Thermal-related (convection, conduction): 10 – 30 km
— Impacts: 2.4 – 19 km
— Mechanical: 0.1 – 10 km
The authors propose that mechanical methods are measuring the thickness of only the topmost part of the crust, which is the coldest and likely most rigid. The crust’s thickness may vary from place to place, further complicating the issue.
Temperature? Europa’s surface is about 110 K near its equator and 50 K near its poles.
This is literally awesome.
I want to see this.
Finding even the most basic extraterrestrial lifeforms in my lifetime would be a happy life.
I’d prefer another Saturn mission. One that can better examine Enceladus’s plumes, then drop a boat\submersible into one of Titan’s seas. Two birds, one multi-billion dollar stone. I’m pretty much glued to JPL’s Cassini page. So incredibly cool.
“Philae only weighs something like a few pounds (too lazy to math it out today) on the comet …”
That statement is incorrect by a rather large factor. Philae weighs about 216 pounds on the Earth, but only about 1 gram (or less) on comet 67P. Translated into the same units this is an Earth to 67P gravitational surface strength ratio of about 100,000:1, rather than the 100:1 suggested. That is why Philae’s first bounce took about 2 hours while the maximum bounce velocity was only about 0.3 meters / second. Also note that the ratio is significantly affected by the spin of 67P around its axis of rotation.
@zetopan, 38
Hah, that’ll teach me to doubt my instincts. I almost wrote that it only weights a couple of grams (wasn’t sure of the exact number for the same mathlazy reasons) but I thought, “nah, I’ve clearly made that up!”
Fucking gravity, huh? How does it work?
I’ll be in the embarrassment booth for a while…
#38, zetopan
Augh, units! You work for NASA, don’t you?
Why wouldn’t the different tricks that various halophile/halotolerant bacteria and archaea use work in eukaryotes? And why would such a term as “eukaryote” be applicable to life that has a separate origin in the first place?
Also, thermohaline circulation: water could freeze to the underside of the ice; in the process, the salt would stay out, and very salty water would sink toward the bottom. Perhaps the ocean on Europa simply has a hypersaline bottom layer?
Outtttttch. X-)
Rhetorical, I know, but worth some explication for those interested.
The surface gravity of a spherical body is proportional to rρ, where r is the radius, and ρ the average density. Order of magnitude, take 1 km as the effective radius of 67P, and 10^4 km as Earth’s radius. Density of comets is typically 1/10 that of rocky planets, so that gives 100,000:1 as the Earth:67P surface gravity. 216 lb is just about 100 kg = 100,000 grams, hence 1 gram weight on 67P’s surface.