Exploration of the gas giants

[wjfox]

Next stop, Europa? Nano subs to get test beneath Antarctic ice in 2026

By Andrew Jones
published 2 days ago

Submarines, it turns out, could have a big future in space exploration.

The subsurface oceans of the Jupiter moon Europa and Saturn satellite Enceladus are perhaps the most tantalizing places in the solar system in the search for alien life. But these water bodies remain out of reach, hundreds millions of miles away and beneath thick icy crusts.

Now, a European collaboration aims to break through some of the technological and physical barriers in the way of future exploration of icy moons and their waters, using Antarctica as a proving ground.

The TRIPLE-nanoAUV 2 project (TRIPLE stands for "Technologies for Rapid Ice Penetration and subglacial Lake Exploration," while AUV means "Autonomous Underwater Vehicle") is building craft that could melt their way through ice and then unleash tiny submarines to explore the dark, unknown depths at the South Pole — or on icy moons.

The nano-AUVs will be very small — 19.7 inches (50 centimeters) long and 3.9 inches (10 cm) in diameter — allowing them to be contained in an ice-melting probe. These will be supported by a Launch and Recovery System (LRS), which will act as an underwater docking station for AUVs, allowing them to transmit their collected data and charge their batteries.

https://www.space.com/scientists-test-s ... -enceladus

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NASA Tests Dragonfly Titan Drone in Wind Tunnels Ahead of Trip to Saturn
Set for launch in 2027, Dragonfly will be NASA's second flying drone.
By Ryan Whitwam October 27, 2023

NASA is headed to Saturn's moon Titan, and it won't be scooting around on the surface. The Dragonfly mission is built around a nuclear-powered drone that will zip through the moon's thick atmosphere, covering much more ground than a wheeled explorer. Before NASA can launch the mission, it must ensure Dragonfly can fly on Titan. The agency has wrapped up a new round of wind tunnel testing, bringing us that much closer to the skies of Titan.

https://www.extremetech.com/science/nas ... -to-saturn

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Juno mission finds Jupiter's winds penetrate in cylindrical layers
https://phys.org/news/2023-11-juno-miss ... rical.html
by NASA

Gravity data collected by NASA's Juno mission indicates Jupiter's atmospheric winds penetrate the planet in a cylindrical manner, parallel to its spin axis. A paper on the findings was recently published in the journal Nature Astronomy.

The violent nature of Jupiter's roiling atmosphere has long been a source of fascination for astronomers and planetary scientists, and Juno has had a ringside seat to the goings-on since it entered orbit in 2016. During each of the spacecraft's 55 to date, a suite of science instruments has peered below Jupiter's turbulent cloud deck to uncover how the gas giant works from the inside out.

One way the Juno mission learns about the planet's interior is via radio science. Using NASA's Deep Space Network antennas, scientists track the spacecraft's radio signal as Juno flies past Jupiter at speeds near 130,000 mph (209,000 kph), measuring tiny changes in its velocity—as small as 0.01 millimeter per second. Those changes are caused by variations in the planet's gravity field, and by measuring them, the mission can essentially see into Jupiter's atmosphere.

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Scientists discern internal structure of mysterious dwarf planet Eris

Dwarf planet Eris, similar in size to its better-known cosmic cousin Pluto, has remained an enigma since being discovered in 2005 lurking in the solar system's far reaches. While Pluto was explored by NASA's New Horizons spacecraft during a 2015 flyby, Eris - about 40% further from the sun - has never been visited.

But scientists are gaining a fuller understanding of Eris and its differences with Pluto thanks to research that discerns details about this frigid remote world's internal structure and composition based on its orbital relationship with its moon Dysnomia.

Eris, the researchers said on Wednesday, appears to have a rocky interior below a shell of ice. Pluto also has an icy exterior with rock below, but possesses a higher ice content and is thought to harbor an underground liquid ocean.

"We already knew that Eris is more rock-rich than Pluto, but what we didn't know was whether Eris had separated the rock from the ice," said University of California Santa Cruz planetary scientist Francis Nimmo, lead author of the study published in the journal Science Advances.

https://www.reuters.com/science/scienti ... 023-11-15/

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NASA Tests a Prototype Europa Lander
by Matt Williams
November 19, 2023

Introduction:

(Universe Today) In 2024, NASA will launch the Europa Clipper, the long-awaited orbiter mission that will fly to Jupiter (arriving in 2030) to explore its icy moon Europa. Through a series of flybys, the Clipper will survey Europa’s surface and plume activity in the hopes of spotting organic molecules and other potential indications of life (“biosignatures”). If all goes well, NASA plans to send a follow-up mission to land on the surface and examine Europa’s icy sheet and plumes more closely. This proposed mission is aptly named the Europa Lander.

While no date has been set, and the mission is still in the research phase, some significant steps have been taken to get the Europa Lander to the development phase. This past August, engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California tested a prototype of this proposed landing system in a simulated environment. This system combines hardware used by previous NASA lander missions and some new elements that will enable a mission to Europa. It also could be adapted to facilitate missions to more “Ocean Worlds” and other celestial bodies in our Solar System.

Since the 1970s, when NASA’s Voyager 1 and 2 probes flew past Jupiter and its system of moons, scientists have been eager to get a closer look at Europa. Several missions have visited Jupiter since, including the NASA-ESA Ulysses probe, which flew past the system in 1992 and 2004. This was followed by the Cassini–Huygens probe that made a flyby in 2000 on its way to Saturn and the New Horizons mission that buzzed the system on its way to the Trans-Neptunian region. However, only two missions have traveled to the system and remained there to study Jupiter and its satellites: the Galileo (1995-2003) and Juno space probes (2016-present).

Read more here: https://www.universetoday.com/164332/n ... e-164332


Testing Hardware for Potential Future Landing on Europa.
Credit: NASA JPL-Caltech

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Jupiter’s Red Spot Keeps Getting Smaller
by Bob King
November 15, 2023

Introduction:

(Sky & Telescope) Observers have been tracking Jupiter's Great Red Spot (GRS) for more than 150 years and perhaps as long as 358 years if Giovanni Cassini's observations of a remarkably similar feature in 1665 are taken into account. Although the Spot's discovery is sometimes credited to an observation made by English polymath Robert Hooke in May 1664, Marco Forlani makes an excellent case for Cassini's primacy in a 1987 paper in the Journal of the British Astronomical Association. Either way, it's a remarkably long time for a storm to stick around.

The apple of every Jupiter observer's eye, the GRS is a persistent, high-pressure (anticyclonic) storm in the planet's southern hemisphere caught between two opposing jet streams that work in tandem to keep it spinning much like a ball of Play-Doh rolled one direction between the palms of your hand. Data from NASA's Galileo probe, which orbited the planet between 1995 and 2003, found that rising eddies of warm air from thunderstorms beneath the upper cloud deck provided the energy source to feed and maintain the monster spot. But a study published in 2021 based on Juno observations pointed to a source below the cloud base, revealing that the Great Red Spot's roots reach no more than 500 kilometers (300 miles) deep.

Like an earthly hurricane the storm's center is relatively calm, but farther out winds blast between 430 and 680 kilometers per hour (270 to 420 mph). Like the Cookie Monster from the children's TV show Sesame Street the GRS gobbles up smaller passing storms, which help to pump up its rotational energy while at the same time temporarily shrinking its diameter. Another key to its longevity is the fluid medium in which it resides. Unlike an earthly hurricane which quickly loses strength when passing over land, Jupiter is all atmosphere without the frictional barrier that land imposes.

Read more here: https://skyandtelescope.org/astronomy ... -smaller/


NASA’s Juno spacecraft took this portrait of Jupiter's colorful and enigmatic Great Red Spot in 2017.
NASA / JPL-Caltech / Björn Jónsson

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ESA's JUICE Probe Lines Up for First-Ever Earth-Moon Gravity Assist
JUICE will pick up speed from the moon and Earth for the first time, and that's just the start.
By Ryan Whitwam November 27, 2023
https://www.extremetech.com/science/esa ... ity-assist

The European Space Agency's JUICE spacecraft left Earth behind this past April en route to the gas giant Jupiter and its enormous collection of moons. That won't happen for a few years, though. For now, JUICE is headed back toward Earth, but this is intentional. The ESA is gearing up for a first-of-its-kind gravitational slingshot, utilizing both the moon and Earth to accelerate JUICE toward its final destination.

Lining up for the rendezvous was a major undertaking. The ESA notes that it took a 43-minute burn to adjust the spacecraft's trajectory for the Earth flyby. JUICE is large as fast as interplanetary missions go, tipping the scales at more than 13,000 pounds (about 6,000 kilograms). It took 800 pounds of fuel, almost 10% of the craft's reserves, to change its velocity by 200 meters per second for this maneuver.

The team will monitor JUICE (the Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer) as it continues on toward the Earth and moon encounter. This is expected to occur in August 2024, after which JUICE will be headed toward Venus for another gravity assist. It will whiz past Earth twice, in September 2026 and January 2029, before finally making a beeline for the Jovian system. It should get there in mid-2031 and will conduct observations of Jupiter's moons in the ensuing years.

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NASA study finds life-sparking energy source and molecule at Enceladus

by NASA

https://phys.org/news/2023-12-nasa-life ... ecule.html
A study zooms in on data that NASA's Cassini gathered at Saturn's icy moon and finds evidence of a key ingredient for life and a supercharged source of energy to fuel it.

Scientists have known that the giant plume of ice grains and water vapor spewing from Saturn's moon Enceladus is rich with organic compounds, some of which are important for life as we know it. Now, scientists analyzing data from NASA's Cassini mission are taking the evidence for habitability a step further: They've found strong confirmation of hydrogen cyanide, a molecule that is key to the origin of life.

The researchers also uncovered evidence that the ocean, which is hiding below the moon's icy outer shell and supplies the plume, holds a powerful source of chemical energy. Unidentified until now, the energy source is in the form of several organic compounds, some of which, on Earth, serve as fuel for organisms.

The findings, published in Nature Astronomy, indicate there may be much more chemical energy inside this tiny moon than previously thought. The more energy available, the more likely that life might proliferate and be sustained.

"Our work provides further evidence that Enceladus is host to some of the most important molecules for both creating the building blocks of life and for sustaining that life through metabolic reactions," said lead author Jonah Peter, a doctoral student at Harvard University who performed much of the research while working at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.

"Not only does Enceladus seem to meet the basic requirements for habitability, we now ha

ve an idea about how complex biomolecules could form there, and what sort of chemical pathways might be involved."