New discoveries about Europa to be announced today

shizz

http://www.space.com/13635-jupiter-moon-europa-press-conference.html

Definite proof of water under there?

Edit: correcting awful title mistake haha

Overature

cant wait

shizz

Any one know when this is happeneing our time? I can't find anything on space.com unluess this is it http://www.space.com/13648-europa-icy-lakes-earth-antarctica-analogues.html But it doesn't mention the announcment so I doubt it?

Nice read all the same

namloc1980

shizz wrote: »

Any one know when this is happeneing our time? I can't find anything on space.com unluess this is it http://www.space.com/13648-europa-icy-lakes-earth-antarctica-analogues.html But it doesn't mention the announcment so I doubt it?

Nice read all the same

Press conference was 2 hours ago.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGMke36mbx8

Link

shizz

namloc1980 wrote: »

Press conference was 2 hours ago.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGMke36mbx8

Link

Thanks for confirming that for me Great news. Hope we get a mission there asap.

Plug

How deep do they reckon the ice is now. Its hardy what some people think, up to 100km thick? I'd prefer a robotic mission there rather than a manned mission to Mars.

Overature

Plug wrote: »

How deep do they reckon the ice is now. Its hardy what some people think, up to 100km thick? I'd prefer a robotic mission there rather than a manned mission to Mars.

i dont see a mission there any time soon, although it would be awesome, id say it would be alot cheaper to get to mars than build a fancy drill

shizz

Overature wrote: »

i dont see a mission there any time soon, although it would be awesome, id say it would be alot cheaper to get to mars than build a fancy drill

Ah im sure Bruce Willis isn't up to much. Maybe he could take care of the drill? :pac:

Overature

shizz wrote: »

Ah im sure Bruce Willis isn't up to much. Maybe he could take care of the drill? :pac:

good idea, though i dont want micheal bay anyway near it!

anybody have any more detailed video?

namloc1980

Here's the full video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ldzRCO55cUw

namloc1980

shizz wrote: »

Thanks for confirming that for me Great news. Hope we get a mission there asap.

There are no planned missions to Europa at the moment and with NASAs bleak budget outlook a Europa mission is at least 15/20 years away, if not longer.

shizz

Believe me I know how long these things take to come around to actually happening but i got excited

oneillMan999

We wont see it in our lifetimes unfortunately unless China take a mad notion and get working on it ASAP!

New_Flash

Did she say Connemara Chaos? That'd be a cool name for a trad/metal crossover band.

tricky D

shizz wrote: »

Thanks for confirming that for me Great news. Hope we get a mission there asap.

The monoliths will scupper any landing attempts. We were warned in 2010.

rccaulfield

Wow!

Kidchameleon

Overature wrote: »

i dont see a mission there any time soon, although it would be awesome, id say it would be alot cheaper to get to mars than build a fancy drill

I read about a better alternative to a drill. The probe would actually heat up, and melt its way down.

namloc1980

NASA have asked JPL and scientists to develop a concept for a Europan lander (actually 2 landers)!





Initial concept is for two landers to ensure that at least one survives landing. Europa is a hostile environment plus we don't have high resolution imagery of it's surface. Given Europa's surface is primarily made of ice it's likely to have very rough terrain in places. Imagine trying to land on something like this!



This is only at concept stage, but at least it's being talked about!

Link

Plug

They should crash a probe into it while capturing images from that probe and maybe another one orbiting like they done on the moon.

namloc1980

Plug wrote: »

They should crash a probe into it while capturing images from that probe and maybe another one orbiting like they done on the moon.

Crashing a probe would not accomplish specific science goals at Europa. A soft lander could take samples and analyse them for their chemistry and take spectacular surface images.

Plug

SAN FRANCISCO — NASA is considering dropping two robotic landers on the surface of Jupiter's moon Europa, a body that many scientists regard as the solar system's best bet for harbouring life beyond Earth.

Read more.

maninasia

I don't know about NASA sometimes, they move in such small steps these days. If you are going to bother sending two probes which will take years to design and 6 years to get there (2026!) you may aswell make one a lander and the other a nuclear powered heated and swimming robot which could works its down to the liquid layers below the surface and beam back images to an orbiter or the lander on the surface.
Earth has the Antartic to test out a lot of this tech. Seriously where's the vision, the get up and go?

EDIT- this explains some of it. It's such a pity the US wasted 100s of billions of USD on it's two recent wars, they could have discovered extraterrestrial life by now with a fraction of the budget.
http://www.space.com/11061-nasa-planetary-science-mars-jupiter-missions.html

namloc1980

The reason is lack of funds. NASA do amazing work with their limited budget. As for a submarine, the Europan ice is tens of kilometres thick. We couldn't do it on Earth, let akone remotely on a moon nearly 1 billion kilometres away with limited funding.

maninasia

Well the theory would be that the heated robot simply melts its way through the ice until it reaches liquid water whereby it becomes a submersible, there are plenty of robotic submersibles operating already on Earth. In theory I believe it is not that complex an engineering problem. I often feel NASA is unwilling to put it's neck out.

Myrddin

maninasia wrote: »

Well the theory would be that the heated robot simply melts its way through the ice until it reaches liquid water whereby it becomes a submersible, there are plenty of robotic submersibles operating already on Earth. In theory I believe it is not that complex an engineering problem. I often feel NASA is unwilling to put it's neck out.

Yes but you've the problem of how it'll report its findings while under tens of km of rock solid ice, the problem of potentially introducing bacteria to the environment & tainting results etc. It's not just as simple as getting there

namloc1980

maninasia wrote: »

Well the theory would be that the heated robot simply melts its way through the ice until it reaches liquid water whereby it becomes a submersible, there are plenty of robotic submersibles operating already on Earth. In theory I believe it is not that complex an engineering problem. I often feel NASA is unwilling to put it's neck out.

Simple in theory but it would require massive leaps in technology, which in turn would need vast resources that NASA simply don’t have. While we do have submersibles on Earth how many of those are operating under a global ice layer up to 100 kilometres thick?

While it may appear easy to just melt through the ice, the technology required to melt through 100 km of ice remotely on a moon nearly 1 billion kilometres away does not exist and would cost untold billions to develop. Because it is so cold in the outer solar system ice is as hard as steel in these places and even the coldest place on Earth is positively balmy compared to Europa. On top of this we don’t actually know much about the Europan ice layer anyway. What if the ice melting probe ran into a layer of rock? That would be the end of that.

That’s why exploration has to be done in small steps. First send an orbiter to get high resolution surface imaging and also carry ice penetrating radar to discover the exact nature of the ice layer. Then send surface landers to get an understanding of the nature of the surface. No point in sending a massively expensive melting robot first, only to discover afterwards that you’ve landed it on a part of the ice layer that’s 150 km thick or is full of rock as well as ice.

I think you are oversimplifying the huge technical challenges involved in doing something like this. For instance the proposed Jupiter Europa Orbiter (currently shelved because of lack of funds) has a price tag in the region of $5 billion. This is because Europa lies deep inside Jupiter’s radiation fields and any spacecraft being sent to Europa needs extensive and expensive radiation shielding as well as radiation proof electronics. Such electronics don’t exist as there is no need for them here, and would need to be developed from scratch. This all costs a lot of money, and this is money that NASA simply does not have.

NASA has an annual budget of c.$18billion and with this it has to operate a manned space program (SLS/ISS/MPCV/Commercial space), planetary exploration (manage all existing planetary probes and develop new ones), Earth science (manage existing earth observing satellites and develop new ones), helioscience (manage a load of Sun observing probes and develop new ones), astrophysics (manage space telescopes like Hubble, Kepler, Chandra and develop the $9 billion James Webb Space Telescope) and also it develops aeronautic and astronautic technologies.

maninasia

Well explained, but I think that it is certainly not 100km, something like 15km down there may be bodies of liquid water if I recall. Technologically speaking a superheated metal probe is not a huge challenge in and of itself, you could put in a nuclear heating element which would last practically forever. Basically the heated probe may not have to be extraordinarily expensive. The more challenging part (to me) would be to determine it's effectiveness in moving through the ice beforehand and understanding the geology of Europa as you described.

There is no problem about adding bacteria as the superheated probe could be treated beforehand just like any NASA probe and obviously the extreme heat would act as a sterilising agent. In actuality it's very unlikely Earth based microbes could contaminate something that already has life pre-evolved there, it's a non-issue.

maninasia

EnterNow wrote: »

Yes but you've the problem of how it'll report its findings while under tens of km of rock solid ice, the problem of potentially introducing bacteria to the environment & tainting results etc. It's not just as simple as getting there

I've no clue about that but there must be radio wavelengths that can penetrate through this.

Cú Giobach

maninasia wrote: »

I've no clue about that but there must be radio wavelengths that can penetrate through this.

Submarines have to communicate via an antenna above, or towed very close to the surface, so a hard connection to the surface of Europa would be essential, unless a probe records, re-surfaces and transmits.

muppeteer

I think that radio waves travel much better through ice than water, see here:http://www.stolaf.edu/other/cegsic/background/radpropag.htm
So it may not be as big a problem getting a signal through the ice, might need a long ass antenna though.

It would also be an idea to leave smaller relay transmitters/receivers behind as needed on the probes decent.

A proper orbiter mission will have to be completed first to determine the ice depth, composition and a whole load of other critical data for a probe mission. When this is done we can add this information for the experience of getting to the bottom of lake vostok (apparently this month:)).