- NASA’s Juno mission discovered that Jupiter’s icy moon Europa produces 1,000 tons of oxygen every 24 hours.
- This is enough to keep 1 million people breathing for a day, but it is much smaller than previously thought.
- This new data could narrow the chances that Europa can support life in its vast underground ocean.
A water world called Europa, floating in deep space some 400 million miles away, produces 1,000 tons of oxygen every 24 hours. That’s enough oxygen to keep 1 million people alive for a day. NASA reported this week.
However, these new estimates were published in peer-reviewed journals. natural astronomyis not intended to determine how many people can live on this moon of Jupiter. They are helping scientists figure out whether Europa has its own life.
“We believe that Europa is the most likely place for life to exist beyond Earth today,” said Kurt Niebuhr, NASA’s chief scientist for exoplanet exploration who was not involved in the study. “I’m working on it,” he said.
If life forms exist on Europa, they might look like microbes or something more complex. According to NASA. However, they are not visible from the surface, which is a frozen desert.
They likely reside in the moon’s vast underground ocean, which can contain up to twice as much water as Earth.
As we know, water is one of the essential elements of life, but it is not the only one. There is a long list of other chemicals that scientists are looking for, and oxygen is one of them.
NASA’s Juno spacecraft, currently flying around Jupiter and its moons, has made the most accurate estimate to date of Europa’s oxygen production. And it turned out to be much less than we thought.
The latest estimate of 1,000 tons of oxygen produced every 24 hours is more than 86 times lower than some previous estimates. And this new data may cast doubt on Europa’s habitability.
How Europa produces oxygen
Oxygen production appears to be very different in Europe and on Earth. While Earth obtains oxygen through photosynthesis, Europa’s oxygen is a result of its parent planet, Jupiter.
Jupiter emits powerful radiation and bombards Europa with high-energy particles. These particles interact with frozen water ice (H2O) on the moon’s surface.
This interaction separates the H2O molecule into hydrogen and oxygen gases. However, the big question is where that oxygen goes. Some of it could become trapped in the ice, some could escape into space, and some could descend into Europa’s underground ocean.
If enough oxygen reaches the subsurface, Europa’s ocean will have one of the key ingredients for life as we know it. “But that’s a big question mark for us because oxygen can end up in so many different places,” Niebuhr said.
What NASA’s Juno mission has accomplished is further uncovering the total amount of oxygen produced by Europa’s surface. However, it is not yet clear how much, if any, is seeping into the underground ocean.
Measuring oxygen on Europa
To measure the amount of oxygen produced on Europa’s surface, scientists used the Jupiter Auroral Distribution Experiment (JADE) instrument aboard Juno.
JADE was designed to measure charged particles in Jupiter’s auroral regions. However, when Juno flew near Europa in September 2022, JADE successfully measured charged particles emitted from the moon’s atmosphere for the first time.
Scientists used JADE data to estimate the total amount of hydrogen (not oxygen) gas in Europa’s thin atmosphere. Because water molecules have one oxygen atom for every two hydrogen atoms, scientists can use hydrogen gas data to calculate the amount of oxygen produced at the surface.
“This really refines and narrows our understanding of how much oxygen is produced at the surface,” said study lead author Jamie Zareh, an astrophysicist at Princeton University.
“But we don’t know how much will leave the surface and how much will reach the ocean,” Zarai added. NASA’s next mission to Europe, Clipper, may bring us closer to answering that question.
Continuing to explore the possibilities of life
NASA’s European Clipper mission is scheduled to launch in October 2024. Its main purpose is to determine whether Europa is habitable.
Clipper will be equipped with equipment that will help reveal Europa’s inner workings, including underground radar. NASA scientists will use this tool to peer dozens of miles below the Earth’s crust and identify features that could help determine whether oxygen is reaching the underground oceans, Niebuhr said. told BI.
“Clipper is an incredibly exciting mission with important scientific goals that will likely revolutionize our understanding of ice shells, the underground ocean, and how they interact. ,” Zarai said.
Determining whether Europa’s underground ocean contains oxygen will improve our understanding of the Moon’s habitability, but it is not clear whether Europa harbors or could harbor life. It is not confirmed.
“The amount of oxygen available on Europa is not a binary switch that you flip to determine whether or not life exists,” Niebuhr explained.
He pointed out that life has existed on Earth for about 1.5 billion years without oxygen. If it can happen here, it could happen this distant moon too.
As for the Juno mission, Zaray will continue to study the data acquired during this European flight.
“Over the coming years, we will dig deep into this issue and learn all we can,” he said.
