We talk a lot about habitability here on Daily Space, between exoplanets and icy moons in our own solar system. Of late, we’ve been particularly focused on Europa and Enceladus, and if you’ve been watching our Minecraft Monday show, you know I’ve been a little hyped about Ganymede.

With all this excitement about the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, it seems some scientists didn’t like that Uranus’ and Neptune’s moons were left out of the fun. Being presented today at the AGU’s Fall Meeting, Benjamin Weiss, a planetary scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, looked at images from Voyager of several of Uranus’ moons. Per the article: Those images revealed that the moons are made of a roughly 50:50 combination of rock and ices and, like most planetary satellites, have many craters. However, the moons’ surfaces also display some of the classic signs of cryovolcanism, like fresh uncratered material and ridges, valleys, and folds.

Using the same techniques that led us to realize both Europa and Callisto, another of Jupiter’s Galilean moons, had subsurface oceans, the team calculated the possible strength of a magnetic field induced by Uranus on its moons. The story goes on to explain: As a moon orbits a planet, it also travels through the planet’s magnetic field, which isn’t the same strength or direction everywhere. The moon “feels” a changing magnetic field, which is a process that generates an electrical current.

How does that lead us to water? Water carries electric currents quite easily, and if the moon has water, and that water is carrying the current, it induces its own, smaller magnetic field. That smaller magnetic field could theoretically be detected by a magnetometer on a spacecraft near the moons. The calculations from the team showed that “A subsurface ocean on Miranda, Ariel, Umbriel, and Titania would be well within the measurement capabilities of current spacecraft technology, although Oberon’s field might be right on the edge of detectability.”

Once again, I beg the powers that be to fund an orbiter to Uranus. Please.

More Information

Eos article