Sentences with phrase «ice shell»

For example, a thick rigid ice shell makes it very difficult to produce ice volcanoes, which some have proposed to explain certain features seen on the surface.

These models were unable to settle the question of whether or not its ocean extended beneath the entire ice shell.

Since a thinner ice shell retains less heat, the tidal effects caused by Saturn on the large fractures in the ice at the south pole are no longer enough to explain the strong heat flow affecting this region.

The model showed that if there were varying amounts of salt in the surface ice shell, it could provide the necessary density differences for a slab to subduct.

The fourth - largest moon of Jupiter may have a global ocean roughly 50 miles deep, but all that water lies below an intimidating ice shell up to 12 miles thick.

Researchers found the magnitude of the moon's very slight wobble, as it orbits Saturn, can only be accounted for if its outer ice shell is not frozen solid to its interior, meaning a global ocean must be present.

Scientists can't see beneath the thick ice shell of Enceladus, but they can get a sort of window into what lies beneath by measuring its gravity in different spots.

A variety of shaped products can be produced on stick novelty freezers as well as products with one, two or three flavours and products with an ice cream core covered by a water ice shell.

Other scientists had previously suggested reasons for the lag, which included a delay in the eruptions as well as a squishy, slowly responding ice shell.

«I was very happy to see this new work by Kite and Rubin that brings to the fore a process that had escaped notice: the pumping of water in and out of the deep fractures of the south polar ice shell by tidal action,» said Carolyn Porco, head of Cassini's imaging science team and a leading scientist in the study of Enceladus.

You really don't need to propose any terribly squishy ice shell to do it,» Porco said.

To see how an alien habitat could develop inside that active, churning ice shell, Schmidt and Blankenship plan to send robotic vehicles down into small lakes beneath the McMurdo shelf beginning this month.

The findings bolster earlier studies of Europa's surface geology that found regions where the moon's ice shell looks to be expanding in a way that's similar to the mid-ocean spreading ridges on Earth.

By the time Schmidt finished college in 2005, she knew that she wanted to tackle the mystery of Europa's chaotic ice shell.

«New Cassini data from Saturn's largest moon Titan indicate a rigid, weathered ice shell.»

In order to test their hypothesis, the researchers would need more data regarding the eccentricity of Charon's orbit, as well as the interior structure of Pluto and Charon and in particular the thickness, strength, and viscosity of the latter's underground ice shell, which are currently unavailable.

We think that it's a relatively thin ice shell, but that's what we want to find out.»

An analysis of gravity and topography data from Saturn's largest moon, Titan, has revealed unexpected features of the moon's outer ice shell.

«In a future mission, we could fly through those plumes and tell a lot about the chemistry and nature of the surface» and possibly a liquid ocean below, Bob Pappalardo, a planetary scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory who wasn't involved in the work, told Business Insider — all without having to drill through the moon's miles - thick ice shell.

«We're talking about environments where life could be alive today... so these ice shells may serve as a window into the oceans below and oceanic material may be coming up to the surface.

«Once we have those answers, we can tackle the bigger question about life in the ocean beneath Europa's ice shell.»

Astrophysicists also suspect that some super-Earths could contain water, as either an ocean or an ice shell.

Tidal pumping heats the water and the ice shell via turbulence.

Kite and Rubin have proposed that new Cassini data can test this idea by revealing whether or not the ice shell in the south polar region is warm.

«We think they can serve as a good analogue for Europa, one of Jupiter's icy moons, which has similar conditions of salty liquid water underneath — and maybe within — an ice shell,» said Rutishauser.

An international team including researchers from the Laboratoire de Planétologie Géodynamique de Nantes (CNRS / Université de Nantes / Université d'Angers), Charles University in Prague, and the Royal Observatory of Belgium [1] recently proposed a new model that reconciles different data sets and shows that the ice shell at Enceladus's south pole may be only a few kilometers thick.

In order to reconcile the different constraints, the researchers propose a new model in which the top two hundred meters of the ice shell acts like an elastic shell.

So if there were a layer of liquid water beneath Pluto's ice shell, it may have welled up following the Sputnik Planum impact, evening out the crater's mass.

Image showing the thickness of Enceladus's ice shell, which reaches 35 kilometers in the cratered equatorial regions (shown in yellow) and less than 5 kilometers in the active south polar region (shown in blue).

The relative thinness of the ice shell at the south pole could also allow a future space exploration mission to gather data, in particular using radar, which would be far more reliable and easy to obtain than with the 40 km thick ice shell initially calculated.

According to this study, Enceladus is made up successively of a rocky core with a radius of 185 km, and an internal ocean approximately 45 km deep, isolated from the surface by an ice shell with a mean thickness of around 20 km, except at the south pole where it is thought to be less than 5 km thick.

However, the discovery in 2015 of an oscillation in Enceladus's rotation known as a libration, which is linked to tidal effects, suggests that it has a global ocean and a much thinner ice shell than predicted, with a mean thickness of around 20 km.

Initial interpretations of data from Cassini flybys of Enceladus estimated that the thickness of its ice shell ranged from 30 to 40 km at the south pole to 60 km at the equator.

... If anything, the findings intensify interest in the possibility of life on Mars and large moons such as Titan and Europa, which are suspected of containing liquid water beneath their ice shells.»

With eruptions of ice and water vapor, and an ocean covered by an ice shell, Saturn's moon Enceladus is one of the most fascinating in the Solar System, especially as interpretations of data provided by the Cassini spacecraft have been contradictory until now.

«That could only be the case if the ice shell was not frozen to the core but separated by a layer of liquid,» says team member Carolyn Porco.

They originate on the seafloor more than 50,000 metres below the moon's ice shell, which ranges in thickness from three to 35 kilometres.

It will use ice - penetrating radar to measure the thickness of the moon's ice shell, map its internal rifts and faults (clues to the tempo of its geologic activity) and locate pockets of water near the surface.

The illustration shows the ice shell, which is thinner at the polar regions, with the ocean underneath.

Ice shells of icy satellites can have warm interiors — approximately 0 degrees C — but surface temperatures as low as -200 degrees C -LRB--330 F), like on Saturn's moon Enceladus, though the team's apparatus does not reach that extremely low temperature.

Characterizing the ice shell and any subsurface water, and the nature of surface - ice - ocean exchange

There are also similar features near the south pole of Enceladus, the moon of Saturn that is spewing water into space from cracks in an ice shell.

Closed off in her small office, Schmidt turned up her fail - safe Metallica to help her focus and started contemplating warm plumes of ice rising through Europa's ice shell.

In May it approved the Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer, a probe slated for launch in 2022 that will measure the thickness of Europa's ice shell.

And best of all, beneath the ice shell resides an ocean of liquid water some 50 miles deep.

But Schmidt's proposal to tackle the ice shell mystery was too enticing to pass up.

There's evidence, Johnson says, that Europa's ice shell has a two layers: a thin outer lid of very cold ice that sits atop a layer of slightly warmer, convecting ice.

The ice shell was not just a flat, static slab prohibiting interaction between the realms.

She started pestering Brown with questions about Europa's ocean, its ice shell, and the molecules on its surface.