Jupiter’s mysterious moon Europa may hold carbon in the ocean lurking beneath its icy shell
With just a glance at Jupiter’s small, icy moon Europa, the James Webb Space Telescope has bolstered the case that Earth is not our solar system’s sole habitable “ocean world.”
The brief observations used JWST’s Near-Infrared Spectrograph instrument, which is designed to capture spectra—barcodelike measurements that quantify the amount of light at different wavelengths, which scientists can translate into information about chemical composition, temperature and other characteristics of the light’s source.
“Look at our own ocean—it’s got lots of CO2 dissolved in it,” says Bonnie Buratti, a planetary astronomer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Buratti is deputy project scientist on NASA’s Europa Clipper mission, which is scheduled to explore the icy moon during the 2030s, and she was not involved in either piece of new research.
“What we think is happening, when it comes to chaos terrain, is that at some point, the surface got warm enough to break up into these little ice rafts—in some cases, large ice rafts—so that the entirety of Tara Regio is these broken-up puzzle pieces floating around in this now-solidified icy, slushy matrix,” she says. Chaos terrain, she notes, is “a really good indicator of a location that you want to spend some more time looking at.
That logic makes sense to Martin, too. “It’s really a compelling argument to say the unique geologic thing that we observe here is probably related to the unique compositional thing that we see here,” she says.
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