Water plumes over Europa |
Water plumes over Europa |
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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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#2
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Member ![]() ![]() ![]() Group: Members Posts: 706 Joined: 22-April 05 Member No.: 351 ![]() |
We will know long before two decades whether or not the Hubble observations can be repeated. I suspect that we'll also get more sensitive stellar occulations as outlined above.
Then in the late 2020s... Before the plume announcement, one of the goals for the JUICE mission was to use the UVS and cameras to look for plumes using long distance remote observations. (I.e, watch Europa throughout its orbit.) If plume sources have been discovered through any means, then the spacecraft instruments will be nearly ideal. The mass spectrometer is sensitive to AMUs near a thousand (recalling from memory). The radar unit could measure the subsurface structure around the vents. The only key instrument missing would be a thermal imager to image whatever the equivalent of Enceladus' tiger stripes turn out to be at Europa. One other limitation of the JUICE mission is that its Europa flybys are planned for a single position in Europa's orbit. The plumes may not be active or have reduced activity at this location and the sources might be in darkness. -------------------- |
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#3
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![]() Senior Member ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Group: Members Posts: 2530 Joined: 20-April 05 Member No.: 321 ![]() |
One note on the geometry of the plumes: They, like Enceladus's plumes, seem to be associated with the south pole. Unlike the saturnian system, the jovian system has essentially no seasons, so it's conceivable that the plume source, if its sunken into the terrain, might never (or rarely) have a line of sight to Earth and/or the Sun.
On the other hand, most of the plumes themselves would never (or rarely) be in Europa's shadow. If the sources have hotspots, it is not inconceivable that they could be observed and pinpointed from Earth, but the devil's in the details: While any IR thermal analysis would of course lack the spatial resolution to pinpoint the plumes, a temperature sufficiently higher than the background could radiate IR at wavelengths that should be at nearly zero emission from Europa's baseline. This works just fine with Io's hotspots. Moreover, occultation of Europa by Io or Ganymede could allow some extremely precise pinpointing of the source, when the hotspot passes behind the other moon. However, it seems unlikely to me that Europa's hotspots, if any, would be nearly hot enough to allow this observation to work. The temperature difference between Europa's ambient surface and any hotspots is probably less than 300K°, probably far less than that, as well as being very limited in scale. |
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Lo-Fi Version | Time is now: 17th June 2024 - 12:49 AM |
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