Nasa could confirm the existence of an ocean on a moon of Jupiter – The Parisian

De new observations from Europe, one of Jupiter’s moons, have highlighted what seems to be jets of water vapour, announced Monday, Nasa, rejoicing in this “discovery exhilarating”.
Europe, one of the 67 moons of Jupiter, has a large ocean under a thick crust of ice which is regarded as “one of the most promising in the solar system, where life could potentially exist,” pointed out Geoff Yoder, acting director of the Nasa for the science.
These geysers, if their existence is confirmed, may one day offer a means of obtaining, through the sending of robots, samples of the water found under the ice to analyze it without having to do the drilling in miles of ice, he said.
Using of the images by the ultraviolet radiation made using a spectrograph on board the Hubble space telescope, these geysers potentials were observed in the extreme south of Europe and appear as dark spots,” explained during a press conference call William Sparks, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore (Maryland, is). He is the principal author of this observation, which will be published in the next edition of the u.s. journal Astrophysical Journal.
These apparent jets of water vapour that reached up to about 200 km altitude, have been detected three times in 2014 over the course of ten observations of the passage of Europe in front of Jupiter made over a period of fifteen months, suggesting that these geysers are intermittent, he said.
“If the existence of these geysers is confirmed, they would represent a discovery exhilarating, giving us potentially an easier access to the ocean beneath the ice. This will enable us to do the research to find signs of the existence of life,” said William Sparks.
- The limits of Hubble –
But it has also prompted caution, as more clues are needed so that scientists can be certain of this discovery: it will take more observations with Hubble or with other techniques.
The astronomer pointed out that “these observations represent the limit of what Hubble can do.”
“We do not claim to prove the existence of these geysers but have only produced new indications that such phenomena can occur,” resumed Mr. Sparks.
In 2012, another scientific team led by Lorenz Roth of the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, had already detected water vapor spurting from the surface of Europe in the same region of the south pole, which amounted up to 160 miles in space.
both teams used the same instrument to Hubble for their comments, a spectrograph, but the methods are totally different to come to the same conclusion.
If these observations of geysers are confirmed, Europe would be the second moon in the solar system known to have such jets of water vapor: in 2005, the Cassini probe Nasa had detected geysers of water coming out of the surface of Enceladus, one of Saturn’s moons.
Nasa has announced that in 2015 a mission robotics to Europe by 2020, and clarified in may the list of the nine instruments that will be aboard the spacecraft.
The ocean sub-glacial Europe would contain two times more water than all terrestrial oceans combined, and is located under a crust of ice, extremely cold and very hard, the thickness of which is at this stage unknown.
scientists had also announced that in 2015 you have found, also thanks to Hubble, a vast ocean of salty water beneath a thick layer of ice of Ganymede, the largest of the moons of jupiter.
The american probe Galileo, which explored Jupiter and its moons from 1995 to 2003, was detected for the first time indications of the presence of vast oceans on europa and Ganymede.