Europe has under its layer of ice, an ocean of liquid water 100 km of depth. TWITTER / @LonelyProbe
TECHNOLOGY
- NASA will launch a mission between 2022 and 2024 to reach Europe and the orbit
Ensure that you will find in Europe, one of the moons of Jupiter
MADRID, SPAIN (18/NOV/2016).- In the next 20 years scientists may find life outside the planet’s Land and it would be in Europe, one of the moons of Jupiter, which has under its layer of ice, an ocean of liquid water of a hundred kilometers deep, says Kevin P. Hand, astrobiólogo space agency NASA.
“Usually when the public thinks of extraterrestrial life imagine weird creatures and flying saucers, but what scientists are looking for are micro organisms small and simple: find them would be a revolution for biology,” he says.
There are a number of missions centered on this search, and “if there is life in our solar system beyond the Earth, perhaps we will find in the next 20 years”, stressed the deputy principal scientist of solar system exploration at the jet Propulsion Laboratory of NASA (California).
One of these missions is the Europa Clipper, that Hand spoke at the symposium “the origins of life and its pursuit in the universe”, organized by the Ramón Areces Foundation in collaboration with the Real Academia de Ciencias Exactas, Físicas y Naturales, and coordinated, among others, by Carlos Briones, a researcher at the Higher Council for Scientific Research, in the Spanish Centre of Astrobiology.
The objective of this mission, NASA will launch between 2022 and 2024, is to reach Europe and to orbit at least 45 times to detect the “feather” of steam of water and analyze them, a few geysers that scientists know that there are thanks to its detection by the Hubble space telescope.
The next phase of this project -still to be confirmed – will be the depositing on the surface of this moon, a small module capable of performing the analysis “in situ”.
Europa is the sixth satellite of Jupiter -in order of increasing distance-, of similar size to our moon, with a diameter of roughly 3,000 kilometers. It is covered with a layer of ice of between 5 and 15 kilometers thick, and, according to Hand, there is sufficient evidence to believe that underneath it there is a vast ocean of liquid water rich in salts.
This ocean would be up to about 100 km of depth; on the Earth the point oceanic deep (the Mariana Trench) is 11 km and it is known that houses in its depths a solid surface of rock with upwelling underwater volcanic where they exit gases, and other materials that support enough microbial life.
scientists believe that in Europe could happen, that in the depths of your ocean there is also a rocky surface with fumes that can be sustaining some sort of life.
On whether it is more feasible to find life on Mars or in Europe, this scientist responds: “I want to find current life and that will be easier on the moon of Jupiter”. And is that, according to Hand, in the rocks of the subsoil of Mars may have traces of life, but it would be that there were millions of years ago, signs of organisms extinct.
however, it adds to this researcher, in the icy Europe “we know there is water.”
To Hand, if you find life on the red planet probably we would conclude, by your closeness to the Earth, which had the same origin as life on our planet (based on the DNA, and the same type of molecules), but if we find it in Europe will be independent of the land: “it would be the evidence of a second genesis of life”.
“we would come to understand the universe in a different way and the Earth would no longer be the only privileged place, where it has emerged the life.”
In regard to the u.s. elections, Hand indicates that rarely the planetary exploration enters sufficiently into the debate, although he admits that in general NASA has the support of the entire country.
On the president-elect, Donald Trump, and what is expected, the astrobiólogo preferred not to comment, although he did say to be optimistic about the future of NASA: the science and the development of new technology are critical for the progress of the economy, not just of knowledge, so you need to continue to invest.
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