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Space

Jupiter Moon Ganymede May Have An Ocean 106

Posted by timothy from the not-an-ocean-unless-there-are-lobsters dept.
matth writes: "This article talks about how Jupiter's moon, Ganymede, may have a salt water ocean on it. Kind of interesting in light of all we have been talking about with water on planets and what not. If NASA does find water on a planet, the implications could be outstanding, on the other hand, they have yet to find any water on any planet for sure.. yet.... More on Ganymede here."
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Jupiter Moon Ganymede May Have An Ocean More

Jupiter Moon Ganymede May Have An Ocean

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  • Re:hrmm (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    you're ignorant views of this world do look really stupid. If you're starving and living in a box, go get a job. The economy's good, so it won't be that hard. Charities are fine for a while, but use them too much and you may get dependant on them. Or look at it the other way: the USG cuts all NASA funding and suddenly all those people are out of a job. Yeah, they've got good resumes, but if no one needs an actual rocket scientist, what'll they do? Maybe something good could come out of exploration *in the future*. Not everything happens within the next 10 seconds. Medieval alchemists didn't immediately benefit their society, but their work in chemistry benefitted us greatly. Say, following the discovery of ice on [planet/moon/desolate space rock], a research station is built there that creates a new medecine or plant food, which in turn is sold to Earth (creating jobs to sell it) to combat disease and make food cheaper. Or SETI finds ETs, and they for some strange reason decide we're worth helping, and they fix the aforementioned problems (unlikely, but still possible). Is exploration still that pointless?

  • Really? I wonder if it has life. (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I recall reading some of NASA's studies [goatse.cx] showing that Mars had oceans in its past, and that likely meant life. I wonder if the oceans of Ganymede could have sufficient heat, either from internal activity, or radiated from the planet, to have life also?
  • A good survey of the solar system's bodies and their composition and surfaces is The New Solar System [dannyreviews.com]. This has a good chapter on Ganymede and Callisto.

    Danny.

  • I wouldn't have to be different. Salt water can freeze just like any other kind of water. It just has to be at a lower temperature than regular water. And being so far from the sun kind of takes care of that.
  • It's interesting to read the post of others on here. But, I think some of them are done in haste. To me, finding water on a moon that is a great distance away, that is beneath the crust of the said mood is something amazing. Each time we learn something, we learn how much we still need to learn before we understand. Every little bit of science and discoveries help out, and they should not be bashed for being 'predictable'... since before we figured it out, that's all it was.. predicted. Now it's fact.

  • Jovian Moons (Score:4)

    by Ektanoor ( 9949 ) on Sunday December 17, 2000 @04:42AM (#553987) Journal
    The issua of the existence of water in the Jovian Moons was solved long ago. Since Voyager, a large segment of the scientific community came into the conclusion that is a main component of most Moons and specially Europa. Later other evidence showed that water plays a very specific role in the formation of most satellites beyond Jupiter. There is even a phenomena generally called "water volcanism" that suggests that water acts in certain planets, much the same way as we see volcanism in our Hawaian volcanos. This is still under question as all we have is pictures of Triton showing something similar to this.

    Anyway it was a long time question wether this water had a presence in liquid form. At the beginning only Europe suggested such a phenomena. Densities are so low in this planet that many strongly suggested that Europe was mostly a "water world". Besides its "glass-like" surface gave a weight in these argumentations. Ganymede, Calisto and other planets beyond Jupiter were considered to possess water but in "dirty-forms", that means strongly mixed with minerals.

    Now the findings seem to cast a new light on the formation of the Solar System. It seems that water is playing a bigger and more fundamental role in its formation. Somehow this suggests the lack of water as an "exclusion" rather than a rule. The Moon, Mercury or Venus become more "outsiders" rather than players in thsi game.
  • Not to mention that many of the other Jovian satalites are incredibly interesting....making 2001, 2010, 2061, and 3001 all required reading for /.ers....

    What was the other moon that Clarke postulated had an icy crust and an ocean under it? Wasen't it Europa? NASA has all but confirmed that possibility, which seems very likely considering the proximity of Europa to Jupiter and the warming affect that the gravitational pull would have upon Europa's core....
  • If I were a woman, I would be a lesbian too... I would hate to have to decide between men like the people that responded above...
  • It is a well known fact that Mars has a great deal of ice at both poles. So much for no planted without water (I assume they meant liquid water)
  • The ice at the poles of Mars is not frozen water, it is frozen CO2--dry ice.


    Enigma
  • Except the space apples might have trouble space growing when there's no space light reaching the space apple trees. ;-)
  • Wouldn't Jupiter be the largest satellite?

    No. :) Jupiter is a planet; Ganymede is a satellite of Juptier.

  • Except the space apples might have trouble space growing when there's no space light reaching the space apple trees. ;-)

    Not a problem - in the depths of the oceans there are entire ecosystems that thrive without light - they get their energy from geothermal sources.

  • The ice at the poles of Mars is not frozen water, it is frozen CO2--dry ice.

    Actually, the North Pole of Mars is water ice, and the south pole is CO2 ice.

  • So, will our first encounters with aliens be fish?

    More-or-less. It will be with Admiral Ackbar, captaining a Mon Calamari cruiser.

  • I realize that you probably mis-spoke, but the phrase struck me as funny.
    It struck me as funny too. Actually, I didn't misspeak (as such), but perhaps some clarification is in order. I believe absolutely that live exists elsewhere. Intelligent life, I'm not so sure about (the Drake Equation [robertelliott.org] >= 10000 notwithstanding). The discovery of such life, be it on Europa, Ganymede or Minbar, is inevitable, given a long enough time scale. But if silicon-based life -- intelligent or otherwise -- were to be found, it'd go beyond coolness and come out the other side. It'd open up whole new vistas for science.
    Finding ET live during my lifetime, btw, would cause me to be pleasantly surprised.
  • As a biochemist I can hardly wait to see what alien life will look like at the molecular level.

    Ganymede might not help us on this score any time soon though. If the figures they give are correct - that is, the oceans are 90 to 120km below the surface, it would be like tunnelling that deep into rock to get at it, and would require some new tech to do it. I'm guessing a nuclear powered head based ice borer.

  • Go tell that to Chandra Wickramasinghe and Fred Hoyle [freeserve.co.uk]. Or to the Welsh scientists who've reported discovery of an unknown bacterium they suspect came from a comet [freerepublic.com].

    Not that these folks are necessarily right, but the topic has a long and detailed history [mit.edu] with exobiologists, many of whom do consider it possible, if not likely.

    Just because your imagination doesn't stretch that far, doesn't mean it's not possible. Maybe college will open your eyes a little, huh? (When you get there.) [slashdot.org]

    ---

  • Or something that's warm enough to be above freezing, and stay that way... the warmer it is, the faster it "bores."

    AFAIK this is just what's being discussed for the Europa-ocean probe. It'll need a power supply for the instruments anyway, so you might as well just use that to keep it warm for the "drilling."

    ---

  • Re:Echoes of SeaQuest (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    we should be spending more time studying our ocean's depths. Who knows what "alien" life we might find?

    Imagine you find a new lifeform in Earth's ocean depths. It may have a weird shape and color, but it will be DNA-based. A lifeform on another planet is likely to be alien at the molecular level. Even if it's only the size of a bacteria, it will be of a huge interest to biochemists.

  • Dude, come on. Democrats wouldn't trade vote for a packet of cigarettes. You're confused. Republicans need that. Democrats want to give republican's money to those poor people. They want to tax the tobacco industry to pay for the poor.

    I'm glad there are people that make President-elect George Bush appear smart.
  • Certainly oceans contribute a massive amount to the development of life as we know it. However, life as we know it could not exist without sunlight.

    An ocean of liquid water trapped beneith miles of ice is very unlikely to see much sunlight at all.

    I suppose it might be possible for life to develop through some sort of thermal energy transfer.

    Although it is quite possible that there are many other liquids, such as ammonia, et al that could possible support a complex "organic" structure.

    I believe it's pretty safe to say we're unique in the solar system, if that's what we're looking for.

    Nice.
  • EW!!! The ocean smells bad. Let's go to the Gap [lptrixie.com].
  • they have yet to find any water on any planet for sure.. yet.. Last time I checked Jupiter's moon, Europa had a massive layer of ice completely covering its surface.
  • Isn't there a Shadow ship burried on Ganymede?

    Come to think about it, isn't there one burried on Mars too? Maybe we should try to dig the one on Mars out first before the next big war.

    Always wanted to fly a starfury.

  • It is mans desire to kill other men and explore his land, country, world, universe that leads him to innovate technologically for the most part.

    It think we should encourage exploration as the more healthy of the two.

  • Just a thought, but even if there's no life there, water is extremely useful to us. It of course supplys us with drinking water, but can also be used as a propulsion system by superheating it and shooting it through a nozzle; it can be seperated into hydrogen and oxygen for fuel and breathing; if there are sufficient tides the water could be used to drive generators. Water means we ourselves could go there and expect to have some valuable resources when we get there. Combined with the energy possiblities in Io, this world might be a good place to put a rest stop if we ever explore out that far.
  • Consider also that Venus (and probably Mars) had considerable amounts of (liquid?) water sometime in their past. A lot of Mars water probably boiled away into space when the planet died over the course of a billion+ years. Much is still locked away in underground ice. A lot of Venus water is still present, up to 20% of the very dense, hot atmosphere. If Mars had been further away from the sun and/or started with more water, it might have an ice-encrusted ocean like Europa.

    Europa and Ganymede are simply cool enough to allow the formation of large (though frozen at the top) oceans. BTW I do think there is some sort of primitive, probably bacterial, life in Europa's oceans. Maybe some kind of multicellular life. (And quite possibly Ganymede too.) It will be hard to observe this life without risking contaminating it irreversably.

    Of course I have no hard evidence for this belief. The Moon probably never had much water; but then I suspect that unusual events were involved in the formation of Earth's moon (ie, that it was not formed by the exact same processes that formed the major rocky planets and the Galilean moons and endowed them with water.)
    ---

  • First off, it is Europa not Europe. One is a continent, one is a moon. And also, Europa does not have a glass-like surface. If you have ever seen a picture of it you would know this. It has what more looks like scars [nasa.gov] running all across it. If that's glass-like, that's pretty poor quality glass.

    But, the reason that Europa has the scars and canyons running through it is that scientists suspect that it is an ice surface, with liquid water under the surface pushing and proding upwards. This ice surface is more than likely what is keeping the majority of the liquid water on the moon so that it doesn't dissipate into the atmosphere.

  • But I would be willing to bet that an aquatic civilization could teach us a few things about fluid dynamics, and motion through fluids (both of which I know almost nothing about).

    Since writing may be a tad difficult, a lot of information might get passed down by songs or legends. And I suspect that they may have to develop some form of calculus to describe very advanced turbulence equations. So being a college student there would suck because every exam would be oral, and we all know how well people perform in front of crowds.

  • All these worlds are yours
    except Europa
    Attempt no landings there

    Use them together
    Use them in peace
  • I'd be curious to know what kind of evidence (other than "hard evidence," since we certainly know there is none of that) you have for thinking there's primitive life on Europa and Ganymede?

    ...

    The Moon probably never had much water; but then I suspect that unusual events were involved in the formation of Earth's moon (ie, that it was not formed by the exact same processes that formed the major rocky planets and the Galilean moons and endowed them with water.)

    Uh..no kidding? If, when you say "unusual events," you mean "a catastrophic collision between two huge objects (one being the Earth, the other being a Mars-sized object)," then I would have to say that most of the scientific community would agree with you.

    ~Steve
    --
  • Just an uniformed opinion...
    You got that bit right, at least.

    Do you have any idea how valuable a sample of alien life (even the most primitive algae) would actually be? Any exobiologist would give his eye-teeth to be able to study a sample of alien DNA-eqivalent. It would change the field of comparative biology from pure speculation to hard science - heck, the confirmation that life exists (or existed) outside the earth would probably be the most significant thing we have ever discovered.

    Think about it: finally, PROOF that life can emerge and evolve given half a chance, PROOF that the earth is not a cosmic accident or God's little private joke. Liquid gold does not compare in value, and nor does oil, not even with two frat-boy oilmen in the Oval Office.

  • Its in antartica, about the size of lake ontario, but it is under a glacier 4000 meters thick. Scientists think that the lake has been covered for between 500000 to 1 million years. They also belive that life exists down there, the heat from the earth is enough to sustain life the think. Maybe when we discover whats down there, we can have a refrence for other subteranian oceans.
  • This could be cool! Maybe we can go surfing on Ganymede soon?
  • Sounds like you're misinformed. It would take very futuristic technology to drill that deep on Earth, never mind sending the necessary equipment on a space probe.
  • So Jupiter's moon potentially contains water. Does it sustain the type of atmosphere (temperature, gases, etc.?) that could potentially support life ... such as a human invasion ... if that were ever to become necessary? I know that we (we being humans in general) are destroying this planet, so it won't be too many centuries before space exploration comes to that. So where will we go? The Moon? Mars? Ganymede? ... Another solar system?

    Hmm, it's an interesting thought.

  • "Informative"? Wow, here's a case where apparently neither the poster nor the moderator read the article.
  • What have you got against algae? Multicellular life evolved very late in the geologic record on Earth, basically as an inconsequential afterthought. Bacteria are the dominant life-form on our planet. Chances are that there is life elsewhere in the solar system, but it's likely to be single-celled.
  • there seems to be more and more evidence accumulating which seems to point to life being very, very common. I mean, even if there is no life no Mars on Ganymede or anywhere else in the solar system than Earth, doesn't just the fact that these planets *have* water tip the Drake Eq to there being billions of life forms on other planets in the Universe, and perhaps just in our galaxy?

    I think we need to start spending large amounts of money, right away, to find out if there really is life on any of these planets or moons. If there is, say we find the fossils of some life form on Mars, I think we need to immediately begin a massive project to search for planets(Hubble-replacement, anyone?) and a larger radio telescope(or array) to search for signals. If life occured two or more separate times in our solar system alone, it would seem to be nearly immpossible that it hasn't occured many times elsewhere. And if it has occured elsewhere, it also nearly nearly immpossible that we are the most advanced civilization in existence(i.e. that no other ETI is out there looking).

    If there are any little green men out there, it's our obligation as an intelligent race to try to find them.

  • Any planet? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    > they have yet to find any water on any planet for sure. Isn't Earth a planet?
  • Sounds like you're misinformed.

    Can I quote you when I next talk to the folks planning this? ;)

    Some quick, publicly-available mentions of the plans (note the recurrent references to Lake Vostok, the Antarctic lake with miles-thick ice cover, which is our present best model for the Europa ocean):

    From Wired [wirednews.com]; search for "Engelhardt", near the end. He's the CalTech glaciologist who invented the "hot water drill."

    BBC's Online [bbc.co.uk] talks about this, too: the article is about the parallels between Antarctia's Lake Vostok and Europa. Search for "melt," it's the third occurance of the word. Frank Carsey, who's talking, is with the Polar Oceanography Group at JPL (and is mentioned in the Wired link, too).

    A website on Europa's oceans [bowdoin.edu], which mentions the "melting" plan. Papers are cited, and the bibliography's here [bowdoin.edu].

    JPL's website also mentions it [nasa.gov]; search for "hydrobots". Also check the Europa Orbiter Fact Sheet link (to a PDF) on that same page.

    And finally, a Michigan State University honors course page [msu.edu] which talks about the proposed Odysseus Mission, which is looking at an ice-melting "drill".

    I'm not misinformed -- I think you haven't thought it through. Yeah, drilling that deep on Earth is incredibly hard, if not impossible. But Europa (and Lake Vostok, for that matter) are covered with miles of ice, not rock... a very different problem, with a very different solution.

    ---

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • So, will our first encounters with aliens be fish?

    Man, there's a new scary movie idea.

  • I'm Thirsty (Score:4)

    by nachoworld ( 232276 ) on Saturday December 16, 2000 @09:38PM (#554027) Homepage
    on the other hand, they have yet to find any water on any planet for sure.. yet

    This explains why I've been thirsty all my life here on earth.

    ---
  • According to the article, there is not an ocean ON it, but under it. The ocean lies 90-120 miles under the crust, hence making it harder to detect. The Galileo craft did magnetic analysis earlier this year and picked up readings that could indicate a salt-water ocean because of its magnetic properties. Its not as simple as just looking at the moon and seeing the ocean.
    -----------------
    Kevin Mitchell
  • Who knows what "alien" life we might find?
    This was the cornerstone of my grade 12 english thesis paper that I wrote called Get Probed [escape.ca]. I got an 85% =)

    ------------
    CitizenC
  • Try Enlightenment Ganymede.
  • Sorry, but most comets contain sizable amounts of water.

    If science is so predictable, what will be the rage in fifty years? You can't compare what crackpots think are happening during alien abductions with discoveries like this.
  • Aye, the next thing we'll pick up from Galileo is a faint transmission:

    ALL THESE WORLDS ARE YOURS...
  • Despite what your weight would be. The temperature on Ganymede would be -297 to -171 degrees farenheit according to this site [planetscapes.com]. It also has many other interesting facts about Ganymede & other planets and their moons.

  • There are critters that live on our ocean floors subsisting purely on the chemicals spewed out of volcanic vents. Bacteria at the base of the food chain subsist on the crud that pours out, and other critters eat them, and so on up to crabs, worms and other kinds of life.

    The sun powers ALMOST all life on earth by "feeding" autotrophs -- but life can exist without solar energy.

    Personally, I believe that anywhere you find liquid water and light (OR a renewable source of high-enegry chemicals), you'll find life. I bet that the ocean floors of Europa and Ganymede will have colonies of life much like what we see around the subsea volcanic vents here on Earth.

    As a biochemist I can hardly wait to see what alien life will look like at the molecular level.
  • about it's center activity, it doesn't have much according to this site [planetscapes.com].......

    Based on geochemical and geophysical models, scientists expected Ganymede's interior to either consist of: a) an undifferentiated mixture of rock and ice or b) a differentiated structure with a large lunar sized 'core' of rock and possibly iron overlain by a deep layer of warm soft ice capped by a thin cold rigid ice crust
  • Man, there's a new scary movie idea.

    new? not really .... how about The Abyss [imdb.com]?

    rLowe

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Actually, ice isn't considered part of the planet's surface, I don't think..., so how I read it is that the salt-water-ocean IS on the surface, (above the geologic crust of the planet) but is covered by a crust of ice that is very very thick.

    But, IANAP (I am not a planetologist *grin*)

    D

  • This article looks suspiciously similar to reports I saw last year regarding ice-covered oceans suspected on Europa [Scientific America 1999, 'The Hidden Oceans of Europa'].
  • All right I now count 5 bodies in this solar system that have, had could or could have had life on/in it. Earth, Mars, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto. But that's just life as we know it, not life as we don't it, that might live in lower tempratures or have strange chemistries and what not. Still, everytime they publish something like this the Drake equation goes up a notch. And that is really fascinating.
  • You'd only be "(pleasantly) surprised" to find life anywhere else? Either you're assuming it already exists--in my estimation a large assumption--or don't attach much significance to such a discovery, for inability to communicate over vast distances or somesuch.

    I realize that you probably mis-spoke, but the phrase struck me as funny. I daresay many other would be more than "pleasantly suprised" if they found any thing as interesting as an extraterristial mold.
  • The point is that while the presence of liquid water doesn't necessarily mean there's life, as far as we know, if you want life, you need water (1).

    Why is water so important? It's an excellent solvent for which reactions can take place in, it has plenty of unique properties and it is also involved in many biochemical reactions itself.

    So the presence of water is a strong indication that life *might* be on water-holding planets.

    So what? Many people don't care if there's life out there. The fact is, if we discovered life on Mars, Ganymede and Europa, then it's pretty much a dead cert that life is *everywhere* in the universe. If that implication doesn't bother you, I don't think I know what does.

    (1) I said 'As far as we know', because while it's true that most experts agree that water is necessary for life, not all of them do.

    It's universally agreed that water is required for our kind of life, i.e. cellular based life, but what about other types of life that you see depicted in some of the more realistic SF novels? Those hydrogen gas-bags in Clarke's 2001 series aren't completely implausible.

    I recently interviewed Dr. Jack Cohen from Warwick University about the plausibility of extra-terrestrial life, including whether water was a prequisite for my site Astrobiology: The Living Universe [thinkquest.org]. You can read the interview here [thinkquest.org].

  • Re:Echoes of SeaQuest (Score:3)

    by rde ( 17364 ) on Sunday December 17, 2000 @03:47AM (#554044)
    It may have a weird shape and color, but it will be DNA-based.

    For a long time I got annoyed by books/tv programmes/whatever that talked about 'alien dna'. However, I've come to realise that any life -- wherever it originates -- is likely to be DNA based. Not will be, I hasten to add, but likely to be. Why? Because the building blocks are very common.

    Despite all the talk in science fiction of silicon based lifeforms, it's still far more likely that anything will be carbon based. Any life is likely to use what we call organic molecules; scientists have even calculated that adenine, one of the four bases, can be formed in space. Given the prevalance of amino acids around the universe, I'd be (pleasantly) surprised to find life anywhere based on anything else. I'd say, though, that DNA based life is, if not ubiquitous, then at least common.

    Nit-picking? probably. I do agree that alien life would be phenomenally interesting from a scientific POV, but to echo the original poster, the ocean still holds untold secrets, from which we have much, much to learn.
  • It's a huge deal because:
    • Liquid water only exists in a very narrow range of temperatures, relative to the rest of Universe. 100 degress Centigrade of permissable range is nothing compared to the millions of degrees of temperature scale throughout the Universe. From this perspective, water can exist as liquid in only a very few places.
    • It is not "certainly true" that life can exist without water. It might be theoretically possible, but that is a long distance from certainly true. The only thing that is certain, in fact, is that some life requires water. It may well turn out that all life requires water, and we won't know until we have seen a negative, which we haven't
  • Recent explorations in the deep sea, much deeper than the penetration of light would allow, have found life much more complicated than algae. It turns out that life, even as we know it, only requires energy to survive; it just so happens that most of the life on this planet use energy from the sun. However, some life, even here on Earth, have developed such that they can draw life-sustaining energy from vents in the bottom of the ocean, and geothermal energy deep in the mantle.

    However, one issue the article doesn't mention is the fantastic pressures that must be involved. A liquid trapped under 100 miles of ice would be under tremendous pressure--IANAS (I am not a scientist) but I would expect that the liquid could be a result of the pressurization itself, rather than any heat source. I dunno if the pressure would be enough to prevent life, but I expect it might be.
  • Do I really need to list them? While he hasn't been "right on" on many of his predictions he's been so close as to not matter.

    I think most of the folks who read Slashdot know enough about Clarke to know that without him the communication age we live in now would not exist.

    What else is there to say? If you bothered reading his books you would know what I was talking about. "Read? Uh, what's that?"

  • Sure clarke is a great author. (Although strangely I don't think 2001 is his best stuff. (not that it isn't really damn good ...) Check out A fall of Moondust and The Deep Range for a slightly different style) But is your statement really true?

    I think most of the folks who read Slashdot know enough about Clarke to know that without him the communication age we live in now would not exist.

    Think about it ... if he had never existed would the change anything? I doubt it. The so called communication age is more of a by-product of world war two and the following cold war than anything having to do with clarke. I guess I think of it as military interest in certain areas giving the buisiness sector a slight push in one direction ... and that push was enough to start a self sustaining cycle of progress. Yeah, that sounds good ... :-)

  • Thanks for the interesting links! My initial impression was obviously unjust.

    AFAIK this is just what's being discussed for the Europa-ocean probe. It'll need a power supply for the instruments anyway, so you might as well just use that to keep it warm for the "drilling."
    I'd like to point out, however, that your original post made it sound like you were claiming there was a definite plan for a particular probe to be sent. From the pages you linked to, it sounds more like blue-sky speculation. Most of the articles talk about burrowing a few km deep on earth, and mention Europa only as a far-out future application. One of them claims that the ice on Europa might be thinner than most people are assuming, but that doesn't seem to be the standard version.

    But anyhow, I appreciate your taking the time out to educate me (and other Slashdotters).

  • Yeah. A testament to Massachusetts Public School System.

    I'm not a biologist anyway, but I seem to remember reading about life that survived near deep-sea volcanic vents. That would require that the core of the satelites be moltent. The liquid rock could then account for the magnetic field cancelling out the reason for believing there is a liquid ocean of water or otherwise.

    Interesting, nonetheless.
  • Hmm, at those temps, don't you think the water will be frozen? Hmm? And, well, gee, a large chunk of frozen water hardly constitutes an "ocean", doncha think?

    Moron. Yes, it'd be downright chilly, and I'd bet the air wouldn't be breathable. Haven't you ever heard of a little thing called a "space suit"? They have air, and heaters too, Granted, they're kinda cumbersome, but hey, we've already used them, on the Moon, to play golf. I doubt surfing would be *much* less plausible.
  • Thanks to you for reconsidering -- I halfway expected to get flamed...

    ...your original post made it sound like you were claiming there was a definite plan for a particular probe to be sent. From the pages you linked to, it sounds more like blue-sky speculation.

    I think the impression you get will depend on whom you talk to -- Engelhardt and Carsey appear to be pretty gung-ho on drilling Europa with hot water (Lake Vostok is just the proving ground), while others are waiting on more results.

    As always, you can't count on NASA's plans until the probe is actually built -- if even then. (The last project I worked on is sitting in a warehouse, and probably will never be launched -- although it is a perfectly good Mars lander.)

    ---

  • This is interesting, its quite late though so I'll not be able to read the articles tomorrow... i guess you learn something every minute...
  • If life occured two or more separate times in our solar system alone, it would seem to be nearly immpossible that it hasn't occured many times elsewhere.

    ...assuming, of course, that the two or more separate occurences aren't related in any way. But that's history, not science.

  • Pre-calculus civilization underneath? (Score:3)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 16, 2000 @09:46PM (#554055)
    Hey, maybe there's an advanced civilization underneath! Since they're stuck under a 120 mile crust, they can't see planets and stars, so they cannot discover universal gravitation, and cannot invent calculus. The college student dream!
  • they have yet to find any water on any planet for sure.. yet..

    Couldn't it be said that every planet is just a moon of Sol? Does it really matter that it is not revolving around a star?

  • HERE [nasa.gov] is what NASA new about Ganymede before this recent spotting.

    They seemed to have a lot of information on that moon for not knowing there is an Ocean on it.

  • Just ask Clarke (Score:4)

    by Wag ( 102501 ) on Saturday December 16, 2000 @09:46PM (#554058)
    You know, all this money could be saved if they just went to Sri Lanka and asked Arthur C. Clarke what's exactly out there.

    He's predicted so many things during his long literary career it's eerie.
  • I think it was also the concept of the Geo-Synchronus satellite (the 'Clark Orbit' as its known) that really made a big contribution also.

  • This whole "look for water in space" thing reminds me of SeaQuest. The whole concept of the show, if I remember it correctly, was that in the future the ocean was the last great place to pioneer.

    It calls to question, if we're looking for the same things in space that we already haven't fully studied on earth, that we should be spending more time studying our ocean's depths. Who knows what "alien" life we might find?

  • >I wonder what kinda strange swimming thing might live in that water.

    Nessie!!!
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • I wonder what kinda strange swimming thing might live in that water.
  • "concluded that Jupiter's largest moon, Ganymede, may possess a huge salt-water ocean beneath its crusty surface."

    That it may possess a huge slaty ocean beneath its surface doesn't sound very conclusive to me...
  • There are tons of Images and animations [nasa.gov] of that moon on the web.

    Look at them and see if you can find some water.

  • Nope, a comet is a ball of ice, so technicly it does have water, although it is frozen solid. Comets also have lots of dust and rock chunks frozen in them, so they would not be ideal to get water from, besides comets have extremely elliptical orbits, so the massive difference between summer and winter would make life highly unlikey...
  • okay, what exactly is the significance of water there?
    it's not as if it was on the surface - or even close to it. then it's been suggested that the water might be similar to our own oceans [including the oil spills? sorry, just can't help myself...].
    that means of course, that it's unlikely to ever be able to support any type of plant life beyond primitive algaes [algii].
    so what's the big deal? nobody is likely to fly all that distance to drill 120 miles through solid ice and rock and then pump up saltwater - heck they wouldn't do it if it was oil, or liquid gold, or 100% pure, liquid silicon.
    not to mention that we wouldn't have the technology to do something like that in the first place.
    let's face it, this is just another PR exploit by NASA trying to keep it's funding.

    While I think NASA should get all the funding they want, I also believe that this type of non-news will be counterproductive in the long run. If they keep going in this way, it's likely that when they finally find something newsworthy, then noone will care.

    Just an uniformed opinion...
  • Oh, I do encourage lesbianism. I don't encourage stupidity, and her post was stupid. The fact that she is a fat cow and could never get up onto a surf board makes it even more idiotic.

    And at least I have the guts to post logged in.

    Rami
    --
  • umm maybe we should be spending time whatever interests us the most. not really a difficult concept, even for seaquest fans
  • Excuse me, mister president. You should know. Where can I get some Tang? - Homer Simpson
  • there's other crap in the water, and also preasure....don't you know anything? go back to high school chemestry you fat cow.

    oh...wait...never mind....high school doesn't allow farm animals...maybe thats why you're so fucking stupid.
  • I was refering to man-made satellites.

    Granted someone else probably would have come up with the idea, but Clarke did it first and won a Nobel prize for it.

    Think of the repercussions of this one idea, and all that's come from it.
  • It's a space station...
    (sorry I had to say it)
    E.
  • There has been talk in the past of meteorites that have supposedly originated from Mars. I find this pretty weird, BUT, if it's true, perhaps meteorites have originated from Earth and perhaps spread life to other bodies in the solar system. This doesn't seem too implausible.

    What do y'all reckon?

    --

  • When it gets cold enough, water ice is a bit different from what you're familiar with -- it behaves more like your "geologic crust" than something you can skate on [aspsky.org]. In the extremely cold conditions of the outer Solar System, water ice (and other volatile ices, too) are very much structural materials; they work just fine as the crust of a planet or a moon. There are even "geologic" processes akin to plate tectonics which can operate with volatile ices replacing the rock that Earth uses.

    In this case, the ocean might be similar to Earth's mantle in function: the still-frozen crustal ice floats on it, much as the Earth's low-density continental and lithospheric rock "floats" on the denser, plastic mantle.

    Just one more comment. It may be that some of the outer Solar System objects (Pluto and Charon, plus some of the outer-System moons) have no "geologic crust" in the sense of a separate rock component: they may be nothing more than large "dirty" snowballs which never differentiated. They would still have a "surface", however...

    ---

  • Well, i guess that deserves an answer.
    especially as you so clealrly state a scientific thesis.
    Wake up - life on other planets wouldn't prove anything, either way. Just like no life on other planets doesn't prove anything.

    It is refreshing how you liberially mix jusgements, science and metaphysics and then draw mathematical conclusions. there might be hope for the lower levels of our species after all.
    In a few decades you will surely pick up the fine distinction between unrelated fields of science and philosphy and might even get to the understanding that mathematical deduction can only be used to support a thesis, never as proof of it.

    Unless it's a mathematical thesis, of course. But then, there are those who would immediately challenge mathemathics on philosophical grounds.

    Anyway, it is quite obvious that the actual message of my somewhat hard to understand post has eluded you. The message was in a nutshell, that I do support every type of space research and exploration, but think that questionable 'discoveries' should not be sensationalized the way they are, lest people loose interest in the subject matter.

    Now again for you:
    if NASA yells: "LIFE" too often, then people won't believe it anymore? Do you need a drawing?

    ---There goes my Karrrma ---
  • There is one potentially interesting variation on the theme of life that is possible - chirality. All life on Earth is based on left-handed protiens, instead of right-handed. And nobody really knows why, because right-handed would be possible, but chemically, might be a bit different.
  • if silicon-based life -- intelligent or otherwise -- were to be found, it'd go beyond coolness and come out the other side.

    Time to reprise my post from a previous space life article: silicon won't work as a basis for organic life [scientificamerican.com].

    The main candidates out there are carbon/water life vaguely similar to stuff on Earth, perhaps carbon/ammonia (or other simple solvent) in a colder environment, and possibly machine intelligence (previously built by carbon folk).

  • back in middle school, of course that was only 4 years ago, but it sure seems like a long time. Anyway, I don't see why it would be such a huge deal, as it seems like there should be plenty of places in the universe that likely have water, it just needs to be warm/cool enough. BTW, I don't know why everyone seems to think water=life. It would certainly be theoreticly possible for life to survive without water, and it is also possible for a planet to have no life even with water. Of course, we need water to live, so we assume that all 'life' would need it, which is certainly not true. The 'water' on ganymede is actually an underground ocean, which could be heated geothermally (I know geo- isnt the proper prefix for this, seeing as how it isnt the earth, but I dont know what else to call it.)

    What I really want to see is some actual mars exploration going on. Time to terraform.... heheh, just watched The Arrival today... :)
  • Not sure why I'm responding.

    First off, wasn't talking baby-science. Was telling him he said something that was wrong. Sue me, if he is a scientist he will go, "Hey great, I learned that Europa doesn't have a glass-like surface".

    Also, I am bilingual does that mean I get special treatment too?

  • Read the frigging article! (Score:3)

    by fremen ( 33537 ) on Saturday December 16, 2000 @10:03PM (#554086)
    The title suggests that Ganymede has an ocean on its surface. The article clearly says that it has an ocean below its crust! What's more is that it says there might be a stable layer of water trapped between two layers of ice 90 to 120 miles below the surface of Ganymede.

    I'm looking at this a bit differently. The water on Ganymede sounds like it could be analogized to the mantle underneath the Earth's crust. It's convection and movement is responsible for the Earth's magnetic field, and it is a melted version of the crust above it. The analogy is a stretch, but I think that is a more accurate way of viewing what this water actually is. Granted, this is still an analogy...

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