Icy moons like Europa and Enceladus are exciting sites for the prospect of life beyond Earth because they are thought to contain oceans beneath their cold surfaces.
Now, a team of scientists has concluded that a speck of material ejected by an outgassing satellite could contain biosignatures — signs of life, if anything is detectable.The team’s research is publish today in scientific progress.
“We have shown for the first time that even a tiny fraction of cellular material can pass through a spacecraft,” Fabian Klenner, a planetary scientist at the University of Washington and lead author of the study, said in a university press release. mass spectrometer for identification.” “Our results give us greater confidence that, using upcoming instruments, we will be able to detect life forms similar to those on Earth, which we increasingly believe may exist on ocean satellites.”
Team develops experimental setup using single-cell bacteria to simulate ice particles in space Salmonella Alaska As a representative of theoretical astrobiology. The bacterium is so small that it lives in the cold waters off Alaska and doesn’t require much nutrients, making it a suitable surrogate for any life that might exist in an underground alien ocean.Researchers will contain liquid water Salmonella Alaska in a vacuum and use laser and spectroscopic analysis to see if the cellular material can be detected. The fact that the bacteria – and in some cases, just some of them – were detectable in the material boosted hopes that the same technique could be applied to truly otherworldly materials.
Several icy moon missions on the horizon: NASA europa speed boatand ESA juice mission To the Jupiter moons Ganymede, Callisto and Europa. NASA’s Juno mission is Already in Jupiter’s orbitand will explore Earth’s satellites on long-term missions.
Earlier this week, another team of planetary scientists determined that the icy crust on Europa is at least 12.43 miles (20 kilometers) thick. This does not match previous estimates of lunar ice, which suggested a thin layer of ice covering a thick ocean.
“Understanding the thickness of the ice is critical to theories that could support life on Europa,” Brandon Johnson, a planetary scientist at Purdue University and co-author of the paper, said in a university news release. “Ice shell The thickness controls the processes that occur inside the ice shell, which is important for understanding the exchange of material between the surface and the ocean. This will help us understand how various processes occur on Europa and help us understand the existence of life. possibility.”
Last year, a team studying data from the retired Cassini spacecraft discovered that Saturn’s moon Enceladus spewed plumes of ice and water. Contains phosphorus, a key ingredient of life as we know it. These plumes of material can be large. Also last year, Webb Space Telescope sees plume Coming from Enceladus, it is 20 times longer than the moon itself.In a sense, these plumes brought buried alien oceans to usinstead space agencies need to develop a way to drill through ice.
The Europa Clipper will carry a vehicle called Surface Dust Analyzer (SUDA)it should be able to detect a single grain of cellular material among the hundreds of thousands of ice particles ejected from the moon’s water plume.
The authors of the new paper hypothesize that bacterial cells in lipid membranes may rise to the ocean surface, forming scum similar to sea foam on Earth. In cracks on the icy moon’s surface, where oceans are drained by icy plumes, any bacteria-like astrobiological material could also be pushed into space.
“Searching for life or traces of life on icy moons may be easier than we thought,” senior author Frank Postberg, a planetary scientist at Freie Universität Berlin, said in a UW press release.
Europa Clipper will arrive in Jupiter’s orbit in April 2030, and JUICE will arrive in July 2031. We still have time to kill, but these new experiments make these upcoming missions even more exciting.
more: NASA reveals ‘message in a bottle’ concept for upcoming Europa mission