Expedition to Europa

Excerpted from Aviation Week, June 3-16 2024, page 38:

Located more than five times farther away from the Sun than Earth,
Europa seems an unlikely place to look for life. Surface temperatures
on the ice-shrouded moon of Jupiter average |-260F, and radiation
levels are high enough to kill a human being in one day.

But ever since NASA’s Voyager flybys in 1979 and the flagship
1995-2003 Galileo mission to Jupiter, scientists have assembled an
increasingly convincing body of evidence that beneath Europa's frozen
surface lies a massive saltwater ocean containing 2-3 times the water
in all the oceans on Earth.

Scientists suspect that Europa’s sea, which lies about 60 mi. beneath
the surface, remains liquid due to the heat of tidal flexing as
Jupiter’s gravity stretches and squeezes the moon. Europa, with a
diameter of about 1,900 mi.—slightly smaller than Earth’s Moon—circles
Jupiter every 3.5 days. Like Earth’s Moon, Europa is tidally locked,
resulting in one hemisphere always facing Jupiter. Tidal forces on
Europa are about 1,000 times stronger than the Moon’s effect on Earth.

Europa’s surface is young—just 40-90 million years old— but its inner
ocean is believed to have existed for billions of years, long enough
for the chemistry of life to evolve. And while there is no evidence of
life on Europa, scientists suggest the moon may have environments
similar to Earth’s deep-ocean hydrothermal vents, where unique
ecosystems thrive despite extreme temperatures and pressures, toxic
minerals and no sunlight.

Observations by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope in 2012 and 2014 also
suggest water from inside Europa may intermittently vent into space as
plumes, similar to what the Cassini spacecraft has observed on
Saturn’s moon Endeladus. Astronomers estimate Europa’s plumes rise
about 125 mi. into space before raining material back down onto the
moon’s surface.

Most big librarys carry AW. 

.<https://europa.nasa.gov/mission/about/>

If it turns out that there is life in the ocean of Europa, which has
existed for something like four billion years, it supports the general
idea of "random but inevitable" theories of Abiogenesis.

Joe Gwinn