NASA's Outer Planets Assessment Group
NASA's Outer Planets Assessment Group hosts their biannual meeting. OPAG member Dr. Britney Schmidt of Georgia Tech presents a public lecture, Europa in Our Backyard: Robots, Radar, and the Search for Life Beyond Earth.
Of all the possible extraterrestrial habitats in our solar system Jupiter’s moon Europa is perhaps the most enticing. Fueled by Jupiter’s immense gravitational tides and covered by an icy outer shell, Europa acquires enough energy to maintain a liquid ocean. Combined with intense surface radiation, this geothermal energy could fuel an active ecosystem that is not dissimilar from the microbial ecosystems observed below thick ice cover on Earth. Europa’s icy plate tectonics, and evidence for shallow water within the ice, implies that rapid ice shell recycling could create a conveyor belt between the ice and ocean, allowing the ocean – including biological material – to one day be sampled by spacecraft.