Using images from NASA’s Voyager Mission (1979) and the orbital Galileo Mission (1995), researchers have created the first global geological map of Jupiter’s largest moon, Ganymede.
PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — Scientists, including Brown University geologists and students, have completed the first global geological map of Ganymede, Jupiter’s largest moon and the largest in the solar system. (more…)
Most of what scientists know of Jupiter’s moon Europa they have gleaned from a dozen or so close flybys from NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft in 1979 and NASA’s Galileo spacecraft in the mid-to-late 1990s. Even in these fleeting, paparazzi-like encounters, scientists have seen a fractured, ice-covered world with tantalizing signs of a liquid water ocean under its surface. Such an environment could potentially be a hospitable home for microbial life. But what if we got to land on Europa’s surface and conduct something along the lines of a more in-depth interview? What would scientists ask? A new study in the journal Astrobiology authored by a NASA-appointed science definition team lays out their consensus on the most important questions to address.
“If one day humans send a robotic lander to the surface of Europa, we need to know what to look for and what tools it should carry,” said Robert Pappalardo, the study’s lead author, based at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. “There is still a lot of preparation that is needed before we could land on Europa, but studies like these will help us focus on the technologies required to get us there, and on the data needed to help us scout out possible landing locations. Europa is the most likely place in our solar system beyond Earth to have life today, and a landed mission would be the best way to search for signs of life.” (more…)
AUSTIN, Texas — Scientists at the University of Texas at Austin’s Institute for Geophysics helped develop a blueprint for a possible future NASA lander mission to Europa, an icy moon of Jupiter that has a global ocean covered by an ice shell. Europa’s large reservoir of liquid water has long enchanted planetary scientists with the possibility of harboring life. Many experts believe it to be the most likely place in our solar system besides Earth to host life today. The proposed mission is designed to assess the moon’s habitability by studying its surface composition, ice shell, ocean and geology.
Don Blankenship, senior research scientist at the institute, is part of the science definition team commissioned by NASA to draft the report, which appears in the August 2013 issue of Astrobiology. Blankenship and two colleagues — Krista Soderlund, postdoctoral fellow at the institute; and Britney Schmidt, formerly a postdoctoral fellow at the institute, now assistant professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology — developed a part of the mission scenario that would use sound waves to study the moon’s icy shell, deep ocean and possible shallow lakes. (more…)
