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As it turns out, you can literally scratch the surface of Europe to find life.
In an article published today in Nature Astronomy a group of JPL researchers claim that even the hardest-exposed areas, you may not need to dig more than 20 cm, or just under eight inches, to find the trace of life on Jupiter's moon Europa
Europa is one of the four big moons of Jupiter. , is known to have an ocean below, and is considered one of the best places to have life within our solar system. But the moon is also exposed to huge amounts of intense radiation from Jupiter, which extends beyond the planet. While life under Europa's thick layer of ice would be well protected, the researchers wanted to know if we could still find evidence of life on the surface or if it would be destroyed by radiation .
"We have long known that the radiation on the surface of Europe is really dominant on the surface, as if sitting in a particle accelerator," says Tom Nordheim, researcher at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Lead author of this paper
.The evidence of life would be from the ocean to the surface: Europa is known to have some active "plumes", something like an ice-gushing geyser that sprays water from the ocean a few kilometers into space before falling back to the surface .The ocean water can, like ours, be filled with microbes and other chemicals directly related to the Microbial life is unlikely to survive the brief out-of-world trip.But the byproducts of life might.The study wanted to know how many of these byproducts would survive and they could be detectable by a future NASA mission.
Etu of examined where the radiation of Jupiter strikes the hardest. In these areas, the surface is too continually beaten by radiation for some amino acids – the building blocks of proteins – to persist. But about 4 to 8 inches down, these amino acids are a bit more protected. It could work like this: the amino acids of the inner ocean are ejected in space, change due to radiation, fall to the surface and cover up more ice deposits on a time scale that allows certain amino acids to survive. In turn, a future lander would just have to take a basic sample deep enough to find the amino acids and confirm that Europe is ripe for life. In areas outside the harder parts of the radiation, amino acids can be literally below the surface.
"Even in the harshest areas of radiation, you only need to scrape the surface to find undamaged material. Nordheim says
This has great implications for NASA's future plans around Europa. In 2022, NASA will launch the Europa Clipper to the Jupiter system. In order to protect the probe from the radiation that it would suffer if it remained in orbit around Europe, the Clipper will actually go into orbit around Jupiter and will fly over by Europa for several close flyovers. The language of congressional appropriation requires a lander to be part of the mission, although NASA has focused primarily on the design of the orbiter. This study shows that it is not difficult to find biosignatures with a lander, whether in 2022 or in Europe.
Preliminary plans from the LG indicate that it could drill 10 centimeters in Europe, "That means we can drill, and we can drill to marginal depths," says Amy Warren, a scientist from the SETI Institute which studies the global habitability. "This really goes against the possibility of going for living environments" (Warren did not participate in the study.)
Although many people would like to explore Europe in person, robotic exploration is currently our best choice. option. While radiation hits some regions of Europe harder than others, no matter where you land, the radiation that encompbades everything would be positively deadly for human beings. "It would certainly be much more beneficial to be outside of these radiation zones, but I do not think that standing on Europa anywhere is a benign environment for human beings," says Warren.
The next steps for the team involve taking a look at how the Europa magnetic field and ionosphere interact with Jupiter's radiation belts and eventually push them. The data on Europa are somewhat hampered by the failure of the high-gain antenna aboard NASA's Galileo spacecraft that climbed Jupiter in the 1990s and 2000s, but Nordheim says that it's not the same. there is enough to build good models for Europa. If these models find that Europa's magnetic field protects the moon from radiation, it could give an even clearer picture of the search for biosignatures on the moon, and perhaps even identify ways in which research could be conducted. by an orbiter
. future studies are taking place, the search for life in the solar system is always a deep and heavy question. Fortunately, today 's study shows that exobiologists may not have to dig as deeply as they thought they would respond to it.
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