Water plumes over Europa |
Water plumes over Europa |
Dec 12 2013, 04:55 PM
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#1
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Member Group: Members Posts: 401 Joined: 5-January 07 From: Manchester England Member No.: 1563 |
This seems like the relevant place to post this (could be wrong): Water plumes from Europa? Apologies if it's already been up. The link to the Science article at the bottom doesn't work for me, does anyone have a working link to the original? Cheers.
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Dec 13 2013, 07:29 PM
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#2
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Merciless Robot Group: Admin Posts: 8785 Joined: 8-December 05 From: Los Angeles Member No.: 602 |
Thing is, it seems as if the plumes are rapidly chemically decomposing upon emission (I'm gonna guess that this is due to the Jovian radiation environment). If the water's already quickly dissociating into atomic oxygen & hydrogen from same, how likely would it be for more complex compounds to survive long enough to be sampled?
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Dec 13 2013, 07:54 PM
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#3
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Senior Member Group: Members Posts: 2530 Joined: 20-April 05 Member No.: 321 |
The duration of exposure to local radiation would be a function of how close to Europa's surface the sample is taken. The material is ejected at about 700 m/s, so it ought to be possible to sample it in less than a minute after it was ejected. How short that duration could be made is a question for the engineers. 10 seconds? 5? The lower the flyby, the tighter the margins of error. As the duration is made shorter, the extent of decomposition would be reduced; that's a question for the (organic) chemists. Certainly some organic molecules are extremely durable. I'd be surprised if 10-30 seconds of radiation would obliterate every interesting molecule, if there are any.
The (very preliminary) proposal for the Europa Ice Clipper mission (not to be confused with the current Europa Clipper mission in development) was for a flyby of 50 km. 20+ years later, we might be able to do a lot better than that. It may be desirable to have a leading element, perhaps on the same launch, to verify the presence and location of plumes right before the collector arrives, and to send back a homing signal as a sort of Jupiter-Europa GPS for the collector. |
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