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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Jan 9 2014, 10:07 PM
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#2
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IMG to PNG GOD Group: Moderator Posts: 2254 Joined: 19-February 04 From: Near fire and ice Member No.: 38 |
Before a sample return mission (possibly somewhat Stardust-like) to sample the plumes is flown it is absolutely necessary to know whether the plumes are continuously active or not. If they are not it needs to be determined whether they are always active when Europa is at a specific point in its orbit. This information is necessary for deciding the mission architecture. A spacecraft like JUICE or Europa Clipper should be able to determine this. Waiting for almost 20 years until this is resolved isn't very fun though so maybe this could be determined sooner from ground based observations.
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Jan 9 2014, 10:54 PM
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#3
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Senior Member Group: Members Posts: 2530 Joined: 20-April 05 Member No.: 321 |
As mentioned earlier, opportunities when Europa occults a background object and its light passes through the plumes (or fails to do so) could give us information about the presence and composition.
Pluto has occulted stars every few years, and Europa moves against the background of stars much faster (about 20x) than Pluto does, which should provide a lot more opportunities. The downside is: Europa provides a lot more background light than Pluto does, and Jupiter is likely a factor for some observations, so a favorable signal-to-noise ratio might requires a brighter star being occulted. As I also mentioned, Io could possibly serve as the occulted body, although that doubles the background noise of the observation. Clearly, we will need to characterize the frequency and perhaps periodicity of the plumes before committing to any exploration. They may be very cooperative, like the Old Faithful geyser, or extremely unpredictable, like most terrestrial volcanoes. |
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