Space and astronomy news
Not all rovers are designed to roam around on the surface of other worlds like Mars. One rover, at least, is aquatic; a necessary development if we’re going to explore Enceladus, Europa, and the Solar System’s other watery worlds. This rover is called the Buoyant Rover for Under-Ice Exploration, or BRUIE.
Continue reading “Aquatic Rover Drives on the Underside of the Ice in Antarctica”
What’s been long-suspected has now been confirmed: Jupiter’s moon Europa has water. As we’ve learned more about the outer Solar System in recent years, Europa has become a high-priority target in the search for life. With this discovery, NASA has just painted a big red bulls-eye on Jupiter’s smallest Galilean moon.
Continue reading “Water Vapor Was Just Found on Europa, More Evidence There’s Liquid Water Beneath All that Ice”
Is there a more complicated and sophisticated technological engineering project than a spacecraft? Maybe a particle accelerator or a fusion power project. But other than those two, the answer is probably no.
Spacecraft like the ESA’s JUICE don’t just pop out of the lab ready to go. Each spacecraft like JUICE is a singular design, and they require years—or even a decade or more—of work before they ever see a launch pad. With a scheduled launch date of 2022, JUICE is in the middle of all that work. Now its cameras are capturing images of Jupiter and its icy moons as part of its navigation calibration and fine-tuning.
“It felt particularly meaningful to conduct our tests already on our destination!”
Gregory Jonniaux, Vision-Based Navigation expert at Airbus Defence and Space.
In 2023, NASA plans to launch the Europa Clipper mission, a robotic explorer that will study Jupiter’s enigmatic moon Europa. The purpose of this mission is to explore Europa’s ice shell and interior to learn more about the moon’s composition, geology, and interactions between the surface and subsurface. Most of all, the purpose of this mission is to shed light on whether or not life could exist within Europa’s interior ocean.
This presents numerous challenges, many of which arise from the fact that the Europa Clipper will be very far from Earth when it conducts its science operations. To address this, a team of researchers from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and Arizona State University (ASU) designed a series of machine-learning algorithms that will allow the mission to explore Europa with a degree of autonom.
Continue reading “AI Could Help the Europa Clipper Mission Make New Discoveries!”
On August 19th, 2019, NASA announced that their Europa Clipper mission has been approved to move to the next phase of the mission, progressing to the final design stage.
Continue reading “Exploring The Icy Moons of Jupiter. NASA’s Europa Clipper and ESA’s JUICE”
Jupiter’s moon Europa continues to be a source of wonder and scientific intrigue. As one of the four Galilean Moons (so-named because of their founder, Galileo Galilee), Europa is one of Jupiter’s largest satellites and is considered one of the best bets for finding extraterrestrial life in the Solar System. And recently, it joined its cousins (Io and Callisto) in passing in front of a star.
This type of rare event (a stellar occultation) allows astronomers to conduct unique observations of a celestial body. In Europa’s case, the occultation took place in 2017 and allowed astronomers to make more precise measurements of Europa’s size, its position relative to Jupiter, and its true shape. All this was made possible by the ESA’s Gaia Observatory, which let astronomers know exactly when and where to look for the moon.
Continue reading “Thanks to Gaia, we Now Know Exactly How Big Europa is”
Jupiter’s moon Europa is an intriguing world. It’s the smoothest body in the Solar System, and the sixth-largest moon in the Solar System, though it’s the smallest of the four Galilean moons. Most intriguing of all is Europa’s subsurface ocean and the potential for habitability.
Continue reading “Saltwater Similar to the Earth’s Oceans has been Seen on Europa. Another Good Reason Why We Really Need to Visit This Place”
The search for life has led astronomers to the icy moons in our Solar System. Among those moons, Europa has attracted a lot of attention. Europa is Jupiter’s fourth-largest moon—and the sixth-largest in the Solar System—at 3,100 kilometres (1,900 mi) in diameter. Scientists think that its oceans could contain two or three times as much water as Earth’s oceans. The only problem is, that water is hidden under a sheet of planet-wide ice that could be between 2km and 30km (1.2 miles and 18.6 miles) thick.
A team of scientists is working hard on the problem. Andrew Dombard, associate professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago, is part of a team that presented a possible solution. At the American Geophysical Union meeting in Washington, D.C., they presented their idea: a nuclear-powered tunneling robot that could tunnel its way through the ice and into the ocean.
Continue reading “A Nuclear-Powered Tunneling Robot that Could Search for Life on Europa”
Ever since the Pioneer and Voyager probes passed through the Jovian system in the 1970s, NASA and other space agencies have dreamed of one-day sending a mission to Europa. Beyond Earth, it is considered one of the most promising candidates for finding life, which could exist in the subsurface ocean that lies beneath the moon’s icy crust.
One of these concepts is known as the Cool High Impact Method for Exploring Down into Europan Subsurface (ARCHIMEDES), a proposed direct-laser penetrator that will use a laser light carried by an optical fiber tether to penetrate Europa’s icy crust. This mission could provide future missions with access to the ocean that exists beneath Europa’s surface and enable the search for life there.
Continue reading “ARCHIMEDES: Digging into the ice on Europa with lasers”
What would it be like to be onboard the Cassini orbiter as it made its way around Jupiter and Saturn and their moons? Pretty cool. Now a new video made from Cassini images pieces together parts of that stately journey.