Europa is one of the largest moons of Jupiter. It is ice-covered and the sixth closest moon to planet Jupiter. Jupiter has more than 90 moons. Europa is part of Jovian moons which also include Io, Ganymede, and Callisto known as Galilean moons.
Europa is ice-covered and made of silicate rock and an iron-nickel core. This moon has a very thin atmosphere composed of oxygen and ice covered, beneath the surface ice there may be the presence of salty water ocean. According to astronomers subsurface saltwater ocean has about twice as much water as Earth’s global ocean.
Recently NASA’s Juno spacecraft data suggests that Europa generates almost 1,000 tons of oxygen every 24 hours. This is enough to keep a million humans breathing for a day on Europa.
Researchers with NASA’s Juno mission to Jupiter have determined the rate of oxygen being produced at the Jovian moon Europa to be considerably less than many previous researches. Released on March 4 in Nature Astronomy, the searchings for were obtained by gauging hydrogen outgassing from the icy moon’s surface area making use of data collected by the spacecraft’s Jovian Auroral Distributions Experiment (JADE) tool.
The paper’s authors approximate the quantity of oxygen generated to be around 26 pounds every second (12 kilograms per secondly). Previous quotes vary from a few pounds to over 2,000 extra pounds per second (over 1,000 kilos per secondly). Scientists think that a few of the oxygen created in this way might function its way into the moon’s subsurface ocean as a possible resource of metabolic energy.
With an equatorial diameter of 1,940 miles (3,100 kilometers), Europa is the fourth largest of Jupiter’s 95 known moons and the smallest of the 4 Galilean satellites. Scientists believe a vast inner sea of salted water prowls underneath its icy crust, and they are curious concerning the potential for life-supporting conditions to exist below the surface area.
It is not just the water that has astrobiologists’ attention: The Jovian moon’s location plays a vital duty in organic opportunities also. Europa’s orbit places it right in the middle of the gas titan’s radiation belts. Billed, or ionized, fragments from Jupiter pound the icy surface area, splitting water molecules in 2 to produce oxygen that may discover its means into the moon’s sea.
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