In a new study by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, scientists studied new animation that demonstrates how deformation in the icy surface of Europa could transport subsurface ocean water to the moon’s surface. The study focused on linear features called “bands” and “groove lanes” found on Jupiter’s moons, Europa and Ganymede. Scientists have used the same numerical model to solve mysteries about motion in Earth’s crust.
The animation is a two-dimensional simulation of a conceivable cross-section of a band going through Europa’s ice shell. At the outrageous base is Europa’s sea, and the thick white line over the best speaks to the moon’s surface ice. The waist is the heft of Europa’s ice shell, with hotter hues (red, orange, yellow) speaking to more grounded, more unbending ice. Profundity is set apart on the left half of the activity, while numbers on the base measure are removed from the focal point of the band including on Europa’s surface. Groups on Europa and Ganymede are regularly several miles wide and many miles long. Numbers at best, check the progression of time in a great many years.
As the movement keeps running forward, the ice shell is twisted by gravitational associations with Jupiter. The cold, fragile ice at the surface gets pulled apart. In the meantime, blames in the upper ice shape, mend, and re-frame (noticeable as slanting yellow, green, and blue lines in the upper focal point of the liveliness). The churning material that rapidly fills the base portion of the view is a gathering of little white specks representing bits of Europa’s sea that have been frozen into the base of Europa’s ice shell.
According to scientists, this is a fossil ocean material because the bits of ocean trapped in Europa’s ice shell spend many hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of years being carried to the surface.
When the sea material reaches Europa’s surface, where it can be dissected by a passing rocket, it never again fills in as an example of Europa’s sea as it is in the present. Rather, the shuttle would really be contemplating Europa’s sea as it was a million or more years back. Consequently, it is a fossil sea material.
NASA’s Europa Clipper spacecraft is intended to launch in the early 2020s. The spacecraft will then orbit Jupiter and become the first spacecraft to study Europa exclusively, including the composition of the moon’s surface material. The mission will likely be able to test the model simulated above by using ice-penetrating radar to probe the moon’s bands.
If Europa indeed behaves the way the simulation suggests, it might carry ocean material to the moon’s surface, where Europa Clipper would analyze it remotely using the spacecraft’s infrared and ultraviolet instruments, among others. Scientists could then study the material’s composition to consider whether Europa’s ocean might be hospitable for some form of life.