admin A warm and vibrant “cradle of life”, just like what has happened on Earth, is proven in an alien world that bears the deadly look of Europa.
Europa is a giant ice mass orbiting Jupiter, but NASA scientists have long believed that ice is just a shell, underneath which is a habitable ocean. Studies have been conducted on outreach missions and to support those missions in contrast, including one recently published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets.
The work, jointly performed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), Oxford University (UK) and Hokkaido University (Japan), has modeled the existing data to explain how Europa’s ice cover might be rotating.
“When scientists compare the images the ships will be collected with those of Galileo and Voyager, they can check the location of the ice surfaces whether they changed,” said Dr. Hamish of Oxford.
The Europa Clipper is a specialized craft for the discovery of Europa, planned for launch in 2024 by NASA, and has a mission to hunt for evidence of alien life. Galileo was the Jovian space probe, while Voyager was tasked with understanding the outer reaches of the Solar System.
According to Sci-News, they concluded that the spin was controlled by the dynamics of the subsurface ocean, which also became evidence that the subsurface ocean was very similar to the Earth ocean.
Previous studies have shown that Europa’s ocean is heated from below through tidal heating and radioactive decay of the inner rocky core, while being cooled from the outside by the frozen surface.
The new model indicates this must lead to convection, whereby heat is transported by warm and cold water streams, going up and down.
These currents form alternating east-west currents. At the surface of the ocean, ocean currents exert frictional forces on the ice and cause this crust to rotate.
In contrast, the rotation of the crust also helps to direct the water courses of the underground ocean, causing them to move east-west or west-east.
Not only did this discovery surprise scientists on how an underground ocean could impact the ice cover of moons and planets with the same pattern, but it also helped to understand more about the undersea oceans.
This will also reveal more about Europa’s geological history, the direction for NASA and its partners on their journey to the world of exploration that is expected to help them reach alien life for the first time. It will also serve as an excellent platform for studying other oceanic worlds, including many similarly structured exoplanets that NASA has found.
