What kind of mission would we need, manned or unmanned, to find out if these lakes exist, and if they contain life? What would it cost?
If we find life, what do we do? If it’s equivalent to bacterial only, do ethics require us to “keep out” for fear of contaminating a new ecosystem? What if it’s a more complex form of life (like fish)?
Great discovery. Of course most of us who contemplate the solar swystem have long figured there must be some liquid qater there because of the cracking.
I’m afraid drilling through 3-4 km of ice would require humans present. That’s a massive undertaking, even through ice. Perhaps someday we will have robotic machinery for that sort of task, but that seems a ways off. But then again, a manned mission with all the necessary equipment seems a long ways off, too. We need some engine that will greatly reduce the time of space travel.
If we find life, I believe we should study it. We don’t have Star Trek’s prime directive, which never made sense to me; if your goal is to not influence the development of other worlds, seems the best way to do that is not go to begin with.
Well the effective pressure on Europa at 3000m is ~ roughly 400m on earth due to the lower gravity. So the drilling might be 'easier". However drilling is complicated by the fact that you’d have to lubricate the drill in temperatures of -375C vs the the -50C or so here on Earth. So you would need new lubricants and lots of them because no one is bringing you more if you run out. That means more mass to take to Europa, which means bigger rockets which means bigger cost.
There have been proposals to basically drop a surface station and a contained self heating mass that melts its way into the ice. The two are connected by either by a unspooling hard connection or low frequency transmitter.
Unfortunately the only way to have a self heating sphere is to pack it with RTGs which would also provide the electrical power to run the science packages on board. I can already read the Greenpeace press release now. :dubious:
It seems to me that you shouldn’t have to dig very deep to determine if there is life. If there has been life on Europa for any significant amount of time, then there will probably be the Europan equivalent of bacterial spores frozen all through the ice. If the ice is getting turned over frequently, then it’s unavoidable that nearly all the ice should have traces of organic matter. We just need a probe that can scoop up some surface ice, melt it, and then run it through a mass spectrometer or something to look for traces of complex organic chemicals, or even see if when you melt it any single-celled organisms wake up and start reproducing.
We also have to consider whether life could start at all in such a cold environment. There is life – microscopic life – living in the upper inch or so? foot or so? of the Antarctic ice shield – but I’m pretty sure there would not be any if the whole Earth were like Antarctica and always had been.
It’s a reasonable idea that Europa was once warmer than it is now, and it is also reasonable that the interior could be warmer. We’d be interested even if the life it once had is dead now.
Is Europa locked with Jupiter, always showing it the same side? I’d be quite surprised if it was not. If it is, then I don’t think tidal friction would be a factor.
Drilling isn’t the way to do it. You just have to melt your way through. You spool out cable as you go to maintain contact with the surface. The cable is held in place by the refrozen ice.
It’s possible to have tidal heating even if the world is tidally locked. If the orbit is elliptical, the amount of tidal force on the world will vary as it goes around the orbit, and it will become more and less egg-shaped. Might not be as much tidal heating as if it weren’t tidally locked, but there can be some.
Well, apparently the power source that keeps Europa’s water liquid is “tidally generated heat.” But is that enough to power any lifeforms, I wonder? It would seem to be a dissipated heat, generally convecting from the upper crust into the subsurface ocean and surface lakes. Any points in that process where the energy level is high enough or concentrated enough for something to live off it?
