Finale Friday is sci - 🅕🅐🅒🅣 day, with a story to rival an Indiana Jones ᴬᴰⱽᴱᴺᵀᵁᴿᴱ
Hats and whips are replaced with Telescopes and Magnetometers, to help solve
ＯＵＴＥＲ ＳＯＬＡＲ ＳＹＳＴＥＭ mysteries of old…
II Movement - Water Plumes excerpt: Duration 00:40
The year is 2012.
The Hubble Space Telescope keeps a watchful eye on the mischievous moon of Jupiter, Europa, where Hubble sets its sight on strange activity that escapes Europa's surface to help scientists understand what lies beneath its mysterious ice shell.
Image Credit: Moons of Jupiter - Ron Miller
This satellite has a long-standing reputation for playing sneaky games with scientists. It's now December, and today Europa is acting up again with Hubble detecting suspicious activity coming from its surface.
Fortuitously, Hubble happened to be in the same vicinity to capture the miraculous moment. Moments that are so few and far between, and Hubble immediately reports to scientists.
After interrogating the DATA, scientists saw hints from those signatures that there may be potential plumes erupting at Europa, but the evidence was not conclusive.
And the saga of this stealthy satellite continued.
However, in 2016, Hubble caught what appeared to be products from a water plume escaping the clutches of Europa's ice crust. Europa was finally ready to reveal its watery secret guarding the promise of an ocean beneath.
This event sparked renewed interest in Galileo DATA two decades earlier when it performed its first-ever flyby of Europa and received a strange signal that scientists could not account for at the time.
This graphic shows the location of water vapor detected over Europa's south pole in observations taken by
NASA's Hubble Space Telescope in December 2012.
Credits: NASA/ESA/L. Roth/SWRI/University of Cologne
Hubble's recent plume encounter inspired Margaret Kilverson and Xianzhe Jai to re-examine their old magnetometer data from the Galileo mission. They applied a model based on the new idea that it was a plume they encountered in 1995.
Finale Friday is sci - 🅕🅐🅒🅣 day, with a story to rival an Indiana Jones ᴬᴰⱽᴱᴺᵀᵁᴿᴱ
They ran their model, and the results agreed perfectly. They could finally put "to rest" that the strange signal, all those years ago, were, in fact, a plume...
Click on image above to listen to the full report
NASA Hosts Live Science Chat about Europa Findings - May 2018
“By far the simplest explanation for this water vapor is that it erupted from plumes on the surface of Europa,” said lead author Lorenz Roth of Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio.
"If those plumes are connected with the subsurface water ocean we are confident exists under Europa's crust, then this means that future investigations can directly investigate the chemical makeup of Europa's potentially habitable environment without drilling through layers of ice. And that is tremendously exciting."
Click on Hubble Image below for full article
The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of international cooperation between
NASA and the European Space Agency