A grain of ice pops out of it Jupiterocean moon europaif captured by NASA’s upcoming observations european clipper Spacecraft may be enough to uncover evidence of extraterrestrial life, new experiments suggest.
“With the right instruments, like the Surface Dust Analyzer onboard NASA’s Europa Clipper spacecraft, finding life and its signatures on icy moons may be easier than we think.” said Frank Postberg of the Free University of Berlin. statement. Postberg is a co-author of a new study explaining the results.
The first dedicated mission to Jupiter’s frozen moons, Europa Clipper, is currently scheduled to launch in October 2024. It is scheduled to arrive in 2030 and fly close to Europa nearly 50 times, skimming the icy surface at its lowest altitude. 25 km (16 miles). The mission’s main goal is to learn more about the habitability of Europa’s underground ocean and the thickness of its overlying ice shell. To be clear, this mission is not about finding life. But scientists are now realizing there may be a way.
Related: Strange plume on Jupiter’s moon Europa spews water vapor
One of Europa’s fellow ocean satellites is Enceladusa small icy object in orbit around a ringed planet Saturn. In 2006, cassini mission Saturn discovered plumes of water vapor ejecting from Enceladus’s oceans through large cracks in its surface, dubbed “tiger stripes.”
In 2014, hubble space telescope They observed what appeared to be a similar plume towering 200 kilometers (125 miles) above Europa’s surface. Two years later, another plume was observed emerging from the same location. And in 2018, NASA Astronomers have revealed that it is ancient. galileo spacecraftoperated in orbit around Jupiter from 1995 to 2003; flew through the plume.
With the assumption that Europa Clipper might also fly through the icy Moon’s plume, scientists led by Fabian Krenner of the University of Washington in Seattle predicted that the spacecraft’s Surface Dust Analyzer (SUDA) would fly through the ocean. We investigated whether it would be possible to detect living organisms being transported. Plume. SUDA is designed to study the ice on Europa’s surface and the dust particles thrown on it. space as moon is constantly bombarded by micrometeorites, but perhaps the ice particles within the plume could also be analyzed.
It’s pretty impractical to simulate ice particles hitting a device at high speed in the lab, so Krenner’s team instead simulated the thin, fast movements of water vapor carrying a bacterium called Sphingopyxis alascensis. was injected into the vacuum chamber. Sphingopyxis alaskensis is found in saltwater off the coast of Alaska, where it lives in extremely cold environments and survives on few nutrients.
It’s one of the closest things to life that we have earth It could even survive in the oceans of Europa.
More pertinent to the possibility that Europa Clipper will discover such life forms is that bacteria are “so small that they could theoretically fit into ice grains ejected from oceanic worlds like Enceladus or Europa.” We can,” Klenner said in a statement.
As a result of the vacuum, the water jet collapsed into water droplets and froze as ice grains. The particles were then studied in a mass spectrometer, mimicking the way SUDA studies the particles it actually picks up. Experiments have shown that Sphingopyxis alaskensis, or at least the parts of it that form ocean scum, can actually be detected by studying just one ice grain.
“We have shown that even a small fraction of cellular material can be identified with a mass spectrometer on board the spacecraft,” Krenner said. “These results give us even more confidence that future instruments will be able to detect life forms similar to those on Earth. We increasingly believe that it is possible.”
While Europa Clipper’s instrument cannot identify DNA, SUDA can detect fatty acids and lipids that can form biological cell membranes. In Earth’s oceans, lipid membranes form a thin film of marine debris on the surface of the water. It is this scum that gives sea spray its distinctive odor.
“For me, it’s even more exciting to look for lipids and fatty acids than to look for the building blocks of DNA, because fatty acids seem to be more stable,” Krenner said.
If life forms containing lipid membranes are present in Europa’s oceans, the biological components would be more likely to be detected by the Europa Clipper.
The results of this study were published in the journal March 22nd. scientific progress.
