Sentences with phrase «icy surfaces of»

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

As our P - 3 flying research laboratory skimmed above the icy surface of the Weddell Sea, I was glued to the floor.

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

ONTO THE ICE This image from the Galileo spacecraft shows the icy surface of Europa.

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

«For the first time, we can really determine what these strange welts of the icy surface of Pluto really are,» said William B. McKinnon, professor of earth an planetary sciences in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, who led the study.

Studying creatures that live in extreme climates gives researchers insight into the sort of life that could survive below the icy surface of Europa, illustrated above.

«For the first time, we can really determine what these strange welts of the icy surface of Pluto really are,» said William B. McKinnon, who led the study.

Evidence suggests that beneath the icy surface of Europa, there may be subsurface oceans that could support extremophiles like M. frigidum.

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.

Beneath the icy surface of Enceladus, liquid water is heated as it percolates through the rock of the seafloor.

The cracked icy surface of Europa.

It's easy to imagine that the seafloor miles beneath the icy surface of the Southern Ocean might be a cold, dark, inhospitable place, as devoid of life as the vacuum of space it so closely resembles — but that couldn't be further from the truth.

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.

Designed for wearing at work but flexible enough for a quick hike around town as well, the Santiago shoes use materials made mostly of leather with a rubber sole that can handle slick icy surfaces.

The rain soon turned into a hailstorm, making the track so slippery that some of the cars couldn't even move on the icy marbles that now covered the surface.

All of these molecules stick to the surface of dust specks, accumulating icy layers over millions of years.

The icy deposits appear to be patchy and thin, and it's possible that they are mixed in with the surface layer of soil, dust and small rocks called the regolith.

The three - day observations show that the comet shards brighten and dim as icy patches on their surfaces rotate into and out of sunlight.

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.

This view is a composite of images taken in 1995 and 1998, color enhanced to show details of the cracks and ridges that stretch across Europa's icy 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).

A strong sun will melt surface snow, which then refreezes at night into an icy crust, off of which the next layer of snow can easily slip.

Future wet suits with surface textures like the thick fur of otters that trap insulating air layers could keep tomorrow's divers warmer in icy waters.

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.

It has been known for quite some time that red pigmented snow algae blooming on icy surfaces darken the surface which in turn leads to less albedo and a higher uptake of heat.

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.

Large depressions mar the surface of each, and both feature icy volcanoes possibly powered by liquid beneath the surface.

Philae's job is to sample the pristine icy surface, looking for clues to the origins of Earth's oceans and life itself.

Eventually, sometime about 2.5 billion years ago, the weight of the sediments caused the lake's icy ceiling to collapse, sending immense amounts of water to the surface, the researchers propose online this month in Icarus.

Nobody had ever thought of this roughly 300 - mile - wide icy satellite as anything special — until the Cassini spacecraft witnessed geysers of water vapor blowing out from its surface.

The latest data from the Cassini - Huygens mission, including a mosaic image of the surface, show an odd bright red spot, an icy volcano, and a dark feature that may be a lake.

And since its surface is icy and it has a penchant for spewing water and ammonia into space, researchers have concluded it probably has a crust of ice, a watery mantle and a core of solid rock.

«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.»

Last year, scientists predicted that some of the material spewed out into space by the icy geysers at Enceladus's south pole would slowly fall down to certain areas on the 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.

Scientists analyzing the cracks and ridges on Europa's surface find that its icy skin is also slowly recycled through a process similar to continental subduction on Earth, with one icy plate slipping and buckling under the edge of another.

Here is what scientists think is happening: when Ceres swings through the part of its orbit that is closer to the sun, a portion of its icy surface becomes warm enough to cause water vapor to escape in plumes at a rate of about 6 kilograms (13 pounds) per second.

«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?

«This is the first time water vapor has been unequivocally detected on Ceres or any other object in the asteroid belt and provides proof that Ceres has an icy surface and an atmosphere,» said Michael Küppers of ESA in Spain, lead author of a paper in the journal Nature.

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.

Like a cosmic lava lamp, a large section of Pluto's icy surface is renewed by a process called convection that replace older ices with fresher material.

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

«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.

Mission scientists used state - of - the - art computer simulations to show that the surface of Sputnik Planum is covered with icy, churning, convective «cells» 10 - 30 miles across, and less than a million years old.

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.