Path: ...!Xl.tags.giganews.com!local-1.nntp.ord.giganews.com!news.giganews.com.POSTED!not-for-mail NNTP-Posting-Date: Thu, 27 Jun 2024 18:39:34 +0000 From: Joe Gwinn Newsgroups: sci.electronics.design Subject: Expedition to Europa Date: Thu, 27 Jun 2024 14:39:33 -0400 Message-ID: <63br7jpf7le468rnljlfhaol4432dt70lq@4ax.com> User-Agent: ForteAgent/8.00.32.1272 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Lines: 46 X-Usenet-Provider: http://www.giganews.com X-Trace: sv3-DIx3waVUnjjqyqF6f+gbdmw/Xg5LInHhA+rbYhepuZgHY/A7x+7l/fawLdRcbJbEoOCfPvZhcuS2ark!9E4CvO5YgUXU8c4J5Av0YPkTYO6Z3clnSFWUXJvp68NxhO7fI5Yeo/yEJkKP1jK9l070cqI= X-Complaints-To: abuse@giganews.com X-DMCA-Notifications: http://www.giganews.com/info/dmca.html X-Abuse-and-DMCA-Info: Please be sure to forward a copy of ALL headers X-Abuse-and-DMCA-Info: Otherwise we will be unable to process your complaint properly X-Postfilter: 1.3.40 Bytes: 3180 Excerpted from Aviation Week, June 3-16 2024, page 38: Located more than five times farther away from the Sun than Earth, Europa seems an unlikely place to look for life. Surface temperatures on the ice-shrouded moon of Jupiter average |-260F, and radiation levels are high enough to kill a human being in one day. But ever since NASA’s Voyager flybys in 1979 and the flagship 1995-2003 Galileo mission to Jupiter, scientists have assembled an increasingly convincing body of evidence that beneath Europa's frozen surface lies a massive saltwater ocean containing 2-3 times the water in all the oceans on Earth. Scientists suspect that Europa’s sea, which lies about 60 mi. beneath the surface, remains liquid due to the heat of tidal flexing as Jupiter’s gravity stretches and squeezes the moon. Europa, with a diameter of about 1,900 mi.—slightly smaller than Earth’s Moon—circles Jupiter every 3.5 days. Like Earth’s Moon, Europa is tidally locked, resulting in one hemisphere always facing Jupiter. Tidal forces on Europa are about 1,000 times stronger than the Moon’s effect on Earth. Europa’s surface is young—just 40-90 million years old— but its inner ocean is believed to have existed for billions of years, long enough for the chemistry of life to evolve. And while there is no evidence of life on Europa, scientists suggest the moon may have environments similar to Earth’s deep-ocean hydrothermal vents, where unique ecosystems thrive despite extreme temperatures and pressures, toxic minerals and no sunlight. Observations by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope in 2012 and 2014 also suggest water from inside Europa may intermittently vent into space as plumes, similar to what the Cassini spacecraft has observed on Saturn’s moon Endeladus. Astronomers estimate Europa’s plumes rise about 125 mi. into space before raining material back down onto the moon’s surface. Most big librarys carry AW. .. If it turns out that there is life in the ocean of Europa, which has existed for something like four billion years, it supports the general idea of "random but inevitable" theories of Abiogenesis. Joe Gwinn