The moons of Europa and Enceladus, as imaged by the Galileo and Cassini spacecraft. Credit: NASA/ESA/JPL-Caltech/SETI InstituteICY WORLDS LIKE EUROPA AND ENCELADUS MIGHT ACTUALLY BE TOO SOFT TO LAND ON Article written: 29 Jan , 2018
by Matt Williams
Some truly interesting and ambitious missions have been proposed by NASA and other space agencies for the coming decades. Of these, perhaps the most ambitious include missions to explore the “
Ocean Worlds†of the Solar System. Within these bodies, which include Jupiter’s moon
Europa and Saturn’s moon
Enceladus, scientists have theorized that life could exist in warm-water interior oceans.
By the 2020s and 2030s, robotic missions are expected to reach these worlds and set down on them, sampling ice and exploring their plumes for signs of biomarkers. But according to a
new study by an international team of scientists, the surfaces of these moons may have extremely low-density surfaces. In other words, the surface ice of Europa and Enceladus could be too soft to land on.
The study, titled “
Laboratory simulations of planetary surfaces: Understanding regolith physical properties from remote photopolarimetric observations“, was recently published in the scientific journal Icarus. The study was led by Robert M.Nelson, the Senior Scientist at the
Planetary Science Institute (PSI) and included members from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the
California Polytechnic State University at Pomona, and multiple universities.
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