Podcaster: Fraser Cain
Title: Guide To Space – Chemicals for Life Found on Enceladus
Organization: Universe Today
Link: www.universetoday.com
Description: From April 15th, 2017
Did you hear that NASA just announced an important discovery in the quest to find life on other places in the Solar System? In this quick episode, Fraser details what NASA found on Saturn’s Enceladus and Jupiter’s Europa, and what it means for the search for life.
Bio: Fraser Cain is the publisher of Universe Today
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Transcript:
I know I know this is getting comically hilarious aliens Next episode although maybe aliens this episode anyway NASA made a huge announcement today And I thought it was important enough to stop everything we were doing call Chad and Carla back to universe today headquarters to help me Cover it. Here’s the announcement NASA announced today that they found an important chemical for life hydrogen gas Blasting out of Saturn’s icy moon Enceladus in addition to this they confirmed that Jupiter’s Europa has icy geysers, too Now we’ve known about Enceladus’s plumes for a while. So the discovery of hydrogen gas is pretty exciting We’ve suspected Europa has jets, but more confirmation of their existence is great We don’t know if there’s hydrogen gas in Europa’s plumes Yet, but there’s a spacecraft in the works to help us find out.
Alright, let’s get into the details earlier this week NASA teased us that they were going to be announcing something Interesting about the ocean worlds of the solar system They’re vague on details, but Mike Brown confirmed what I’ve always Suspected European space whales. I was all ready to hear their mournful songs muffled by kilometers of ice But I was sadly disappointed. Okay, fine The reality turned out to be pretty cool to NASA announced that they found evidence that there’s hydrogen gas Pouring into the water of one of Saturn’s icy moons Enceladus Now the source of this hydrogen is probably some kind of hydrothermal activity down beneath the ocean The tidal interactions between Enceladus and Saturn heat up the moon giving it vast oceans Which spew water into space from the cracks at its southern pole and here on Earth? Remember wherever we find water we find life and one really interesting place that we find life is Surrounding volcanic hydrothermal vents at the bottom of the ocean these volcanic vents belch plumes of material into the ocean and Serve as an energy source for a vast array of life forms heat loving thermophilic bacteria known as methanogens Absorb the hydrogen coming from these vents and use them as an energy source Other creatures eat this bacteria and then you got a thriving ecosystem and food chain One of the most interesting things about these hydrothermal vents is how they provide a completely separate Ecosystem from the rest of life on Earth They couldn’t care one bit if the Sun disappeared tomorrow and all life died They just keep slurping up their hydrogen gas going and going and that’s why this discovery about Enceladus Is so exciting in their announcement planetary scientists working with Cassini described how the spacecraft?
Detected this hydrogen gas in the plumes blasting out of Enceladus on October 28th 2015 the spacecraft made its deepest dive through the plumes coming out of Enceladus It sampled the icy material and found that 98% of the plumes is water 1% is Hydrogen and the rest is a mixture of ammonia methane and carbon dioxide Cassini isn’t equipped to search for life. It just doesn’t have the instruments on board It’s ion and neutral mass spectrometer instrument did the next best thing it found food for bacteria When this environment is found on Earth Bacteria has a feeding frenzy. That’s pretty exciting.
The discovery over on Europa is different Astronomers had suspected there were plumes on Europa like Enceladus based on images taken from the Hubble Space Telescope back in 2014 but the results were inconclusive remember the worst kind of conclusive the Hubble team took a second round of images in 2016 and Detected plumes coming from the same region of Europa confirming their existence Is there hydrogen gas in those plumes too?
We have no idea yet, but we soon will in a second I’m going to explain what we’re doing about this what plans are in place to study this even further But first I’d like to thank Caledon tall Isaac Arthur Les Sturman’s Larry Johnson Ryan Williams and the rest of our 705 patients for the generous support if you love what we’re doing and you want help head over to patreon.com Such a universe today. Now. We see another tantalizing clue that there could be life in the oceans of Europa and Enceladus What are we going to do about it?
What plans are in place to go back and study these worlds up close? Good news NASA has actually been working on a new spacecraft that will be able to answer our questions It’s called the Europa Clipper. And if all goes well, it’ll launch for Europa in 2022 on board the new Space launch system or the SLS this mighty rocket will only take three years to reach Jupiter It won’t actually orbit Europa since the radiation from Jupiter would kill even a hardened spacecraft instead It’ll sweep in and make at least 45 flybys of the moon over the course of its mission Building up a detailed map of the entire world Some of its flybys will be as close as 25 kilometers and will pass right through the plumes tasting them with an even more sophisticated suite of instruments than Cassini if Hydrogen gas is coming out of Europa to the Clipper will detect it One of the most interesting and controversial instruments will be its ground penetrating radar system Controversial because this instrument will consume a lot of the spacecraft’s energy budget which could have been used for other instruments Exciting because it’ll be able to determine the thickness of the icy shell on Europa and give us a sense of just how big these Oceans are could there be pockets of liquid water closer to the surface in addition to the spacecraft itself The Europa Clipper might be equipped with an additional tiny lander after the spacecraft had mapped enough of the surface NASA planetary geologists could identify the best landing site to visit Imagine a lander touching down near the vents sampling them up close so much science Once again, we still don’t know if there’s actually life on Enceladus or Europa But this announcement is a huge step forward It tells us that there’s food for life down there under the ice.
And now we just have to go back and learn more What do you think? Are you excited by this announcement? Do you think this changes our priorities for exploration of the solar system and we will see all of you next week.
End of podcast:
365 Days of Astronomy
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