Sentences with phrase «icy moon surfaces»

It allows scientists to measure a variety of ice behaviors at conditions that are applicable to both terrestrial glaciers and icy moon surfaces.

Not exact matches

On May 26, NASA announced a suite of instruments that will accompany the spacecraft they're designing to send to Europa — a moon four times smaller than Earth that scientists suspect could harbor a deep, vast, salty ocean beneath its thick, icy surface.

The spot where Europa's plumes appear to originate (left, with the green oval showing the 2014 occurrence and the blue oval showing the 2016 occurrence) is also the warmest spot on the icy moon's surface, shown in a heat map from the Galileo spacecraft (right, with lighter yellow contours showing relatively warmer regions).

The seemingly bleak icy surfaces of these moons are in fact among the most active landscapes in the solar system.

In 2005, NASA's Cassini spacecraft sent pictures back to Earth depicting an icy Saturnian moon spewing water vapor and ice from fractures, known as «tiger stripes,» in its frozen surface.

Under the icy surface of Saturn's moon Enceladus, a liquid ocean launches water plumes through the cracks.

The presence of sea salt on Europa's surface suggests the ocean is interacting with its rocky seafloor — an important consideration in determining whether the icy moon could support life.

The southern pole of Saturn's 300 - mile - wide moon spits an average of 56 gallons of water a second into space via geysers in its icy surface.

Jupiter's enigmatic moon Europa has long been thought to contain a huge ocean beneath its icy crust, but what is in that ocean and does it ever come to the surface?

They include a robotic arm to scoop samples and others to analyze the chemistry of the Jovian moon's icy surface (SN: 5/17/14, p. 20).

In 2005, NASA's Cassini spacecraft spied jets of water ice and vapor erupting into space from fissures on Enceladus, evidence of a salty ocean beneath the saturnian moon's placid icy surface.

Around the south pole of Enceladus — a 500 - kilometer - wide runt of a moon many expected to be rather inert and uninteresting — the orbiter saw tantalizing signs of activity — plumes of water vapor venting into space from fissures in the icy surface.

The smooth, icy surface of Telesto sets it apart from most other Saturnian moons, which are heavily cratered.

The tiny moon Enceladus, which has a liquid sea below its icy surface and spews geysers of water into space, set behind Saturn as Cassini watched:

I arrive during the last week of field tests for the robotic explorer VALKYRIE, which could one day dive into the ocean thought to hide beneath the surface of Jupiter's icy moon Europa, looking for signs of life.

Researchers suspect that Phoebe's surface has probably changed very little during its captivity, meaning the moon offers unprecedented insights into objects in the Kuiper belt, the icy band from which comets arise.

«I try to imagine how it would be to stand on the surface of this icy object — small enough that a fast sports car could reach escape velocity and drive off into space — and stare up at a 20 - kilometre wide ring system 1000 times closer than the Moon.»

Ice - encrusted Europa is the most likely moon in the entire solar system to have harbored life, perhaps in oceans beneath the icy surface.

«An ocean lies a few kilometers beneath Saturn's moon Enceladus's icy surface.»

Schimdt has found evidence that warm ocean currents and convective forces beneath Europa's frozen shell can cause large blocks of ice to overturn and melt, bringing vast pockets of water, sometimes holding as much liquid as all of the Great Lakes combined, to within several kilometers of the moon's icy surface.

«If you find an ocean beneath the surface of one moon, perhaps the same is true of other icy objects in space,» says Jesper Lindkvist.

And how exactly do the grains of rock get to the surface of the icy moon?

There has long been speculation as to whether Jupiter's large, icy moon Callisto has an ocean beneath its surface.

Its icy surface was as white and bright as fresh snow, and whereas the other airless moons were heavily pocked with craters, Enceladus was mantled in places with extensive plains of smooth, uncratered terrain, a clear sign of past internally driven geologic activity.

The $ 2 billion Europa mission will orbit Jupiter's icy moon, using its instruments to observe the surface up close and probe for information about the subsurface environment.

«We'd like to see if frictional heating on faults of icy moons can explain the geysers of liquid water observed on their surfaces,» McCarthy said.

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.

Most likely, scientists have proposed, the tidal flexing induced in a moon's icy surface causes cracks in polar regions to open widest while the satellite is farthest from its parent planet but clamp shut at other times.

Now, Waite is interested in applying mass spectrometry to determine Europa's surface composition, data that could clarify how the moon's icy surface interacts with the liquid oceans below.

By simply tracking water as it melted, migrated, and refroze, Schmidt had, in mere months following a trip to the Antarctic, come up with by far the most complete model of the icy moon's chaotic surface.

Scientists were already fairly confident in the ocean's existence, based on the moon's smooth icy surface — evidence of past resurfacing by the ocean — and other observations by the Galileo spacecraft, which made a handful of flybys in the 1990s.

As it orbits, Europa's icy surface heaves and falls with the pull of Jupiter's gravity, creating enough heat, scientists think, to support a global ocean beneath the moon's solid shell.

All have icy surfaces, but they are darker and rockier than Saturn's moons.

By devising and running a new computer model, Quillen, a professor of physics and astronomy at Rochester, has now shown that the tidal pull exerted by another, similar object could be strong enough to crack the surface of such icy moons.

NASA has released a report outlining goals for a proposed mission to the surface of Jupiter's icy moon.

Enceladus's plumes are thought to originate in water escaping from a subsurface ocean through cracks in the moon's icy surface.

When planetary scientists started studying the photographs and data from Voyager and the subsequent Galileo mission that studied the Jovian system during the 1990s and early 2000s, they confirmed this notion: these ridges, or lineae, are fructures, or cracks, on Europa's icy surface, caused be the intense tidal forces of the massive, nearby Jupiter and the orbital resonances with the other nearby moons.

Enceladus is subject to forces that heat a global ocean of liquid water under its icy surface, resulting in its famous south polar water jets which are just visible below the moon's dark, southern limb.

NASA elected to steer Galileo into Jupiter in 2003, and Cassini into Saturn in 2017, to remove the small threat of these spacecraft crashing into an icy moon and potentially contaminating each surface.

It also would be far easier to get a water sample from Enceladus, which has plumes of water vapor, ice and particles shooting more than 300 miles off its surface, than from other moons, such as Jupiter's Europa, where a massive ocean is believed to be buried beneath a thick icy crust.

Just as our moon's gravity squeezes and stretches the Earth a bit, causing the oceans to rise and fall, Saturn's massive gravitational pull squeezes and stretches its tiny moon, causing cracks on its icy surface to open and allowing water to shoot out.

The large satellites of Uranus show unique geologic features we'd like to understand (such as the tortured - looking surface of Miranda, a small moon with the tallest cliff in the Solar System), while Neptune's satellite Triton is thought to be a captured Kuiper Belt object, similar to Pluto, potentially harboring an ocean under its icy surface.

«Unless Europa has been expanding within the last 40 to 90 million years, there has to be some process on this icy moon that's able to accommodate a large amount of new surface area being created at dilational bands.»

To go to Enceladus, she added, any lander would need to be very clean as liquid water is in contact with the moon's icy surface, so contamination of the subsurface ocean would be a very real possibility.

The prime mission plan includes 40 to 45 flybys, during which the spacecraft would image the moon's icy surface at high resolution and investigate its composition and the structure of its interior and icy shell.

The most plausible source of this hydrogen is hydrothermal reactions between hot rocks and water in the ocean beneath the moon's icy surface.

Cassini discovered a liquid - water ocean under the icy surface of the moon Enceladus and, perhaps a victim of its own success, must die to prevent any chance that its warm electric generators might melt their way down into those life - friendly waters.

Ammonia, in addition to sodium carbonate and sodium bicarbonate found at Occator, has been detected in the plumes of Enceladus, an icy moon of Saturn known for its geysers erupting from fissures in its surface.

In October 2008, Cassini flew very close to the surface of Saturn's icy moon Enceladus.

Scientists say they've discovered evidence of a watery ocean with warm spots hiding beneath the surface of Saturn's icy moon Enceladus.