What a pleasure to see new images from JunoCam, the visible-light camera aboard the Juno spacecraft that has now imaged in its peregrinations around Jupiter the surface of its most interesting moon. Our probing of Europa’s secrets has depended heavily upon the imagery returned by the Galileo spacecraft. That mission made its last flyby in 2000, and we have another wait while ESA’s Juice mission and Europa Clipper make the journey, the former enroute, the latter scheduled for an October launch.
Juno’s 2022 flyby thus gave us a helpful visual update, one that is complemented by an informative snapshot taken by the spacecraft’s Stellar Reference Unit (SRU) star camera. While we have five high resolution images to work with, the Stellar Reference Unit’s black-and-white image has produced the most detail. The image is intriguing because of its method, for bear in mind that the SRU is designed to track stars for navigation purposes. That makes it a dim light instrument, one that must be handled carefully to avoid washing out the image. The Juno team used it on Europa’s nightside, where the ambient light was sunlight reflected off Jupiter itself and the Sun was safely hidden.
Image: From Juno’s SRU, this image shows the location of a double ridge running east-west (blue box) with possible plume stains and the chaos feature the team calls ‘the Platypus” (orange box). These features hint at current surface activity and the presence of subsurface liquid water on the icy Jovian moon. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI.
What emerges is a jumble of chaotic terrain cut by ridges and laden with a reddish-brown material familiar from Galileo imagery of the moon. These dark stains have been hypothesized to be the deposits of cryovolcanic plumes. Amidst this terrain, a new feature emerges that interrupts different forms of terrain. The Juno team has christened it the Platypus. Here the ridge topography breaks down as it encounters what is clearly younger material laden with ice blocks, a disrupted area that is some 37 kilometers by 67 kilometers in size. A double ridge line north of the Platypus is also apparent, the complex terrain suggesting the kind of surface change that researchers believe may allow ocean water to come close to the surface in isolated pockets.
The mention of plumes is intriguing because of the possibility of one day collecting samples from a spacecraft during a flyby, although no plumes are evident in the Juno imagery. Both the Platypus and the double ridges suggest recent activity. On the possibility of plumes, the SRU paper notes:
Diffuse discontinuous low-albedo deposits flank double ridges ∼50 km north of the “Platypus” chaos margin, extending radially outward from the lineaments. The morphology of these deposits is similar to features observed elsewhere on Europa that have been associated with hypothesized plume activity, the discontinuous low-albedo spots flanking Rhadamanthys Linea being a prominent example (Quick & Hedman, 2020). Quick and Hedman (2020) surmise that 1–10 m thick deposits can be emplaced by sufficiently compact plumes and detected by high-resolution visible wavelength cameras. The radii of the deposits observed by the SRU are ∼2–5 km, which Quick & Hedman’s models associate with <10 km high plumes.
We can also compare the Juno imagery with that of Galileo, as the JunoCam paper does:
The number of documented craters larger than 1 km on Europa has gone from 41 to 40 craters. Careful comparisons of the JunoCam images with overlapping images from Galileo show no surface changes due to plume deposits or ongoing geologic activity over time intervals of 23–26 yr, though admittedly the images are not well matched in resolution, viewing geometry, and wavelength. No active eruptions were detected. Finally, from the Europa data set taken on 2022 February 24, we can say that the north polar cap of Europa at this image scale looks similar to lower latitudes.
It’s worth adding here that a recent search using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) collected data over four days to examine the moon’s entire surface, coming up with no evidence of plume activity. We’re clearly not dealing with a geyser phenomenon anywhere as active as what we find at Enceladus, and thus far evidence from the Hubble instrument has been the most compelling, but even the data from its 2013 observations remain at the edge of detection. Clearly the search for active plumes will continue given their exciting implications.
Meanwhile, evidence for surface activity of other kinds on Europa continues to emerge, presenting new targets for Europa Clipper as well as Juice. Juice (Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer) launched on April 14, 2023 and will arrive in July of 2031, while Europa Clipper is scheduled to reach the giant planet in April of 2030. The new imagery suggests that Europa’s outer ice shell moves freely over the ocean (“true polar wander”), capturing steep depressions up to 50 kilometers wide near the equator. These ovoid features are similar to those found in other parts of Europa. Candy Hansen, who leads JunoCam planning at the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, AZ, notes their relevance:
“True polar wander occurs if Europa’s icy shell is decoupled from its rocky interior, resulting in high stress levels on the shell, which lead to predictable fracture patterns. This is the first time that these fracture patterns have been mapped in the southern hemisphere, suggesting that true polar wander’s effect on Europa’s surface geology is more extensive than previously identified.”
The landscape of ice blocks and troughs near Europa’s equator broken by depressions tells a tale that must be interpreted in terms of light and shadow. The feature called Gwern, for example, an apparent impact crater found in Galileo imagery, turns out under different lighting to be nothing more than an oval shadow caused by the intersection of prominent ridges. Cross-cut ridges and the dark stains that may mark the residue from ancient (or recent) plumes offer a compelling landscape. New features like the Platypus will get a particularly hard look from our incoming spacecraft.
Image: Jupiter’s moon Europa was captured by the JunoCam instrument aboard NASA’s Juno spacecraft during the mission’s close flyby on Sept. 29, 2022. The images show the fractures, ridges, and bands that crisscross the moon’s surface. Credit: Image data: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS. Image processing: Björn Jónsson (CC BY 3.0).
The SRU paper is Becker et al., “A Complex Region of Europa’s Surface With Hints of Recent Activity Revealed by Juno’s Stellar Reference Unit,” JGR Planets 22 December 2023 (full text). The paper on the JunoCam imagery is Hansen, “Juno’s JunoCam Images of Europa,” Planetary Science Journal Vol. 5, No. 3 (21 March 2024), 76. Full text. The paper on the ALMA observations is Cordiner et al., “ALMA Spectroscopy of Europa: A Search for Active Plumes,” submitted to IAU Symposium 383 conference proceedings (preprint).
Exploring the depths: How iron snow could unlock the secrets of life on Europa.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/phys.org/news/2024-05-exploring-depths-iron-secrets-life.amp
“What emerges is a jumble of chaotic terrain cut by ridges and laden with a reddish-brown material familiar from Galileo imagery of the moon.”
“The greater diversity of microbial metabolisms identified by Dr. Sahai and her team suggest a wealth of potential biosignature molecules that could be targeted for detection”
After reading Alex Tolley’s comment about Jupiter’s radiation, I realized something that could explain life’s origins.
Induced Magnetic Field from Europa’s Subsurface Ocean.
https://europa.nasa.gov/resources/174/induced-magnetic-field-from-europas-subsurface-ocean/
Slowly rotating electromagnetic fields may be the key for generating DNA and RNA.
“Ernst can imagine that in certain surface-catalyzed chemical reactions – such as those that could have taken place in the chemical “primordial soup” on the early Earth – a certain combination of electric and magnetic fields could have led to a steady accumulation of one form or another of the various biomolecules – and thus ultimately to the handedness of life.”
Primordial Magnetism: The Hidden Force Behind Life’s Origin.
https://scitechdaily.com/primordial-magnetism-the-hidden-force-behind-lifes-origin/
The primordial earth’s magnetic field and the then close and magnetic field of the “newborn moon” may have created similar conditions as Europa in earth’s oceans some 4.3 billion years ago.
I like the idea that iron can increase the biodiversity and probably biomass in what is likely to be a fairly anoxic subsurface ocean. What the authors suggest is that reactive oxygen molecules such as peroxides which could provide for aerobic organisms are instead oxidizing iron which can then be used by anaerobic organisms. The claim is that peroxides that could damage biomolecules are therefore rendered harmless yet still transfer their energy to the iron which can support the anaerobes.
What I am not clear about is that the rate of peroxide formation from Jupiter’s radiation is quite meager, therefore I am not sure that the advantage is that important. It certainly should increase biodiversity, but the energy transfer is still low, so I am not sure there is that much impact on the biomass and their claim that it increases the potential detection of biosignature molecules.
Nevertheless, an interesting idea if life is extant in the Europan ocen.
Platypus looks like a giant sink hole where maybe there was a void under the ice shell and the thin shell collapsed? There appear to be two craters in the ‘tail’ of the Platypus. Could this feature be an exposed rock ‘island’ in the sea below the ice which presents an older surface showing ancient impacts or sign of vulcanism?
This was a good read today on Clipper
https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasas-europa-clipper-makes-cross-country-flight-to-florida
A fascinating find, and a beautiful example of NASA extracting maximum value from a spacecraft! I do wonder if the authors might be holding something back for a future publication. They don’t say very much about the raised cones in the southwest part of the northern lobe (seemingly aligned with either side of a linea) and a long raised feature that seems to run under the linea at the “neck” of the feature, with traces of that linea seeming visible on top of it. The ‘eyes’ (I’m thinking ‘mares’) look to be near the end of that feature, and might arise from brine infiltration. Do you think we might see something later about a cryo-lava tube that links all these features together?
If there are signs of life on Europa it will likely be in these frozen pools. They may also be low melting point paths into the interior for later craft.
If there is plenty of salts in these frozen melt pools perhaps a melting device based on microwaves would be suitable to melt down into ocean below.
Melting salty ice is near as good as heating pure water whereas melting pure water ice is much, much more difficult, this bodes well for a deep drive probe. Perhaps a metal cable carrying microwave energy could be lowered into the ice shelf of Europa powered by a nuclear source on the surface.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/0808.2085
The frozen surface of Europa, its inner ocean – if it exists – and its tidal forces suggest to me the following idea: we seek life while it is perhaps still in gestation. The chemical elements (frozen?) are perhaps present on Europa but the physical conditions are not yet all met to make emerge the life which will appear perhaps in X million years, in the same way that it took a combination of circumstances (exceptional?) and several million years for it to appear on earth. Even admitting extreme organisms, I find it difficult to conceive of even primitive life in such a cold place and with so little inertia…
For the pleasure of reflection:
at what point on the temporal scale of the life of a star should we seek life? what would we find? Are we looking for Life in a developed minimal form or components that could make it emerge, which is not the same at all;) Finally, would not introducing one of our probes risk modifying the creation process of the Living One who could be in court …in a positive or negative way?
Maybe we should be looking for Europan life in Jovian space…
https://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/97nov/space.htm
PDF version here:
https://nss.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/Space-Manufacturing-conference-11-001-Keynote-Address-Freeman-Dyson.pdf
and this…
https://www.geekwire.com/2024/europa-clipper-life-jupiter-ice-grains/
https://www.drewexmachina.com/2014/03/27/a-europa-io-sample-return-mission/
The Voyager probes encountered the same problem. As described in the 2017 documentary The Farthest, the engineers wrapped aluminum foil around the exposed wiring, and it worked at protecting the probes from Jupiter’s intense radiation field.
NASA science head optimistic Europa Clipper launches on schedule
Jeff Foust
July 16, 2024
BUSAN, South Korea — The head of NASA’s science directorate says she remains optimistic the Europa Clipper mission will launch on schedule in October despite concerns about the spacecraft’s electronics and its launch vehicle.
The $5 billion mission is scheduled to launch on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy during a three-week window that opens Oct. 10. The spacecraft will go into orbit around Jupiter in 2030 and make dozens of close approaches to Europa, an icy moon that has a potentially habitable subsurface ocean.
NASA announced July 11 that the mission was studying transistors on the spacecraft that may not have the level of radiation tolerance required for the mission, based on experience with similar components used elsewhere. Jupiter’s powerful magnetic field creates high doses of radiation in the form of charged particles for spacecraft in its vicinity, including around Europa.
“Testing data obtained so far indicates some transistors are likely to fail in the high-radiation environment near Jupiter and its moon Europa because the parts are not as radiation resistant as expected,” the agency stated. “The team is working to determine how many transistors may be susceptible and how they will perform in-flight. NASA is evaluating options for maximizing the transistors’ longevity in the Jupiter system.”
Full article here:
https://spacenews.com/nasa-science-head-optimistic-europa-clipper-launches-on-schedule/
I could ask a silly question such as why weren’t these transistors checked out for radiation resistance earlier? But I won’t.
Here is my review on The Farthest:
https://www.centauri-dreams.org/2018/10/12/the-farthest-voyager-in-space/
This is not comforting, especially considering that the mission launches in less than two months.
https://astrobiology.com/2024/08/europa-clipper-transistors-can-probably-support-the-baseline-astrobiology-mission.html
Europa Clipper Transistors Can (Probably) Support The Baseline Astrobiology Mission
By Keith Cowing
Status Report
NASA
August 29, 2024
NASA’s Europa Clipper mission remains on track, with a launch period opening on Thursday, Oct. 10. The next major milestone for Clipper is Key Decision Point E on Monday, Sept. 9, in which the agency will decide whether the project is ready to proceed to launch and mission operations.
NASA will provide more information at a mission overview and media briefing targeted for that same week.
The Europa Clipper mission team recently conducted extensive testing and analysis of transistors that help control the flow of electricity on the spacecraft.
Analysis of the results suggests the transistors can support the baseline mission.
——-
Earlier post
NASA Continues Assessing Electrical Switches on Europa Clipper
Launch preparations are progressing with NASA’s Europa Clipper mission. The spacecraft arrived at the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida in May, where the team recently attached the high-gain antenna.
Engineers with NASA’s Europa Clipper mission continue to conduct extensive testing of transistors that help control the flow of electricity on the spacecraft. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, which manages the mission, began the tests after learning that some of these parts may not withstand the radiation of the Jupiter system, which is the most intense radiation environment in the solar system.
Tests also are being conducted at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. APL designed the main spacecraft body in collaboration with JPL and NASA Goddard.
The issue with the transistors came to light in May when the mission team was advised that similar parts were failing at lower radiation doses than expected. In June 2024, an industry alert was sent out to notify users of this issue. The manufacturer is working with the mission team to support ongoing radiation test and analysis efforts in order to better understand the risk of using these parts on the Europa Clipper spacecraft.
Testing data obtained so far indicates some transistors are likely to fail in the high-radiation environment near Jupiter and its moon Europa because the parts are not as radiation resistant as expected. The team is working to determine how many transistors may be susceptible and how they will perform in-flight. NASA is evaluating options for maximizing the transistors’ longevity in the Jupiter system. A preliminary analysis is expected to be complete in late July.
Radiation-hardened electronics are used throughout industry to protect spacecraft from radiation damage that can occur in space. The Jupiter system is particularly harmful to spacecraft as its enormous magnetic field — 20,000 times stronger than Earth’s magnetic field — traps charged particles and accelerates them to very high energies, creating intense radiation that bombards Europa and other inner moons. It appears that the issue that may be impacting the transistors on Europa Clipper is a phenomenon that the industry wasn’t aware of and represents a newly identified gap in the industry standard radiation qualification of transistor wafer lots.
Europa Clipper’s launch period opens Oct. 10, and it is set to arrive at Jupiter in 2030, where it will conduct science investigations to understand the potential habitability of Europa as it flies by the moon multiple times.
https://astrobiology.com/2024/08/astrobiology-fleet-update-video-europa-clippers-super-size-solar-arrays.html
Astrobiology Fleet Update: Video: Europa Clipper’s Super-Size Solar Arrays
By Keith Cowing
Press Release
NASA
August 28, 2024
NASA’s Europa Clipper spacecraft recently got outfitted with a set of enormous solar arrays at the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Each measuring about 46½ feet (14.2 meters) long and about 13½ feet (4.1 meters) high, the arrays are the biggest NASA has ever developed for a planetary mission. They have to be large so they can soak up as much sunlight as possible during the spacecraft’s investigation of Jupiter’s moon Europa, which is five times farther from the Sun than Earth is.
The arrays have been folded up and secured against the spacecraft’s main body for launch, but when they’re deployed in space, Europa Clipper will span more than 100 feet (30.5 meters) — a few feet longer than a professional basketball court. The “wings,” as the engineers call them, are so big that they could only be opened one at a time in the clean room of Kennedy’s Payload Hazardous Servicing Facility, where teams are readying the spacecraft for its launch period, which opens Oct. 10.
Flying in Deep Space
Meanwhile, engineers continue to assess tests conducted on the radiation hardiness of transistors on the spacecraft. Longevity is key, because the spacecraft will journey more than five years to arrive at the Jupiter system in 2030. As it orbits the gas giant, the probe will fly by Europa multiple times, using a suite of science instruments to find out whether the ocean underneath its ice shell has conditions that could support life.
Powering those flybys in a region of the solar system that receives only 3% to 4% of the sunlight Earth gets, each solar array is composed of five panels. Designed and built at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, and Airbus in Leiden, Netherlands, they are much more sensitive than the type of solar arrays used on homes, and the highly efficient spacecraft will make the most of the power they generate.
At Jupiter, Europa Clipper’s arrays will together provide roughly 700 watts of electricity, about what a small microwave oven or a coffee maker needs to operate. On the spacecraft, batteries will store the power to run all of the electronics, a full payload of science instruments, communications equipment, the computer, and an entire propulsion system that includes 24 engines.
While doing all of that, the arrays must operate in extreme cold. The hardware’s temperature will plunge to minus 400 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 240 degrees Celsius) when in Jupiter’s shadow. To ensure that the panels can operate in those extremes, engineers tested them in a specialized cryogenic chamber at Liège Space Center in Belgium.
“The spacecraft is cozy. It has heaters and an active thermal loop, which keep it in a much more normal temperature range,” said APL’s Taejoo Lee, the solar array product delivery manager. “But the solar arrays are exposed to the vacuum of space without any heaters. They’re completely passive, so whatever the environment is, those are the temperatures they get.”
About 90 minutes after launch, the arrays will unfurl from their folded position over the course of about 40 minutes. About two weeks later, six antennas affixed to the arrays will also deploy to their full size. The antennas belong to the radar instrument, which will search for water within and beneath the moon’s thick ice shell, and they are enormous, unfolding to a length of 57.7 feet (17.6 meters), perpendicular to the arrays.
“At the beginning of the project, we really thought it would be nearly impossible to develop a solar array strong enough to hold these gigantic antennas,” Lee said. “It was difficult, but the team brought a lot of creativity to the challenge, and we figured it out.”
More About the Mission
Europa Clipper’s three main science objectives are to determine the thickness of the moon’s icy shell and its interactions with the ocean below, to investigate its composition, and to characterize its geology. The mission’s detailed exploration of Europa will help scientists better understand the astrobiological potential for habitable worlds beyond our planet.
Managed by Caltech in Pasadena, California, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory leads the development of the Europa Clipper mission in partnership with APL for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. APL designed the main spacecraft body in collaboration with JPL and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, and Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia. The Planetary Missions Program Office at Marshall executes program management of the Europa Clipper mission.
NASA’s Launch Services Program, based at Kennedy, manages the launch service for the Europa Clipper spacecraft, which will launch on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket from Launch Complex 39A at Kennedy.
Find more information about Europa here: europa.nasa.gov
September 11, 2024
JunoCam spots new volcano on active Io
by Europlanet Media Centre
A new volcano has been spotted on Jupiter’s moon Io, the most geologically active place in the solar system. Analysis of the first close-up images of Io in over 25 years, captured by the JunoCam instrument on NASA’s Juno mission, reveal the emergence of a fresh volcano with multiple lava flows and volcanic deposits covering an area about 180 kilometers by 180 kilometers. The findings were presented at the Europlanet Science Congress (EPSC 2024) in Berlin this week.
The new volcano is located just south of Io’s equator. Although Io is covered with active volcanoes, images taken during NASA’s Galileo mission in 1997 did not see a volcano in this particular region—just a featureless surface.
“Our recent JunoCam images show many changes on Io, including this large, complicated volcanic feature that appears to have formed from nothing since 1997,” said Michael Ravine, Advanced Projects Manager at Malin Space Science Systems, Inc, which designed, developed and operates JunoCam for the NASA Juno Project.
Full article and images here:
https://phys.org/news/2024-09-junocam-volcano-io.html
https://astrobiology.com/2024/09/short-timescale-spatial-variability-of-ganymedes-optical-aurora.html
Short-Timescale Spatial Variability of Ganymede’s Optical Aurora
By Keith Cowing
Status Report
astro-ph.EP
September 11, 2024
Ganymede’s aurora are the product of complex interactions between its intrinsic magnetosphere and the surrounding Jovian plasma environment and can be used to derive both atmospheric composition and density.
In this study, we analyzed a time-series of Ganymede’s optical aurora taken with Keck I/HIRES during eclipse by Jupiter on 2021-06-08 UTC, one day after the Juno flyby of Ganymede. The data had sufficient signal-to-noise in individual 5-minute observations to allow for the first high cadence analysis of the spatial distribution of the aurora brightness and the ratio between the 630.0 and 557.7 nm disk-integrated auroral brightnesses — a quantity diagnostic of the relative abundances of O, O2 and H2O in Ganymede’s atmosphere.
We found that the hemisphere closer to the centrifugal equator of Jupiter’s magnetosphere (where electron number density is highest) was up to twice as bright as the opposing hemisphere.
The dusk (trailing) hemisphere, subjected to the highest flux of charged particles from Jupiter’s magnetosphere, was also consistently almost twice as bright as the dawn (leading) hemisphere.
We modeled emission from simulated O2 and H2O atmospheres during eclipse and found that if Ganymede hosts an H2O sublimation atmosphere in sunlight, it must collapse on a faster timescale than expected to explain its absence in our data given our current understanding of Ganymede’s surface properties.
Zachariah Milby, Katherine de Kleer, Carl Schmidt, François Leblanc
Comments: 20 pages, 13 figures, 7 tables
Subjects: Earth and Planetary Astrophysics (astro-ph.EP)
Cite as: arXiv:2409.06055 [astro-ph.EP] (or arXiv:2409.06055v1 [astro-ph.EP] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2409.06055
Journal reference: The Planetary Science Journal, Volume 5, Issue 7, July 2024
Related DOI:
https://doi.org/10.3847/PSJ/ad49a2
Submission history
From: Zachariah Milby
[v1] Mon, 9 Sep 2024 20:30:53 UTC (9,658 KB)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.06055
https://astrobiology.com/2024/09/iceworld-update-new-project-to-unlock-earth-lifes-secrets-in-extreme-cold.html
Iceworld Update: New Project To Unlock Earth Life’s Secrets In Extreme Cold
By Keith Cowing
Press Release
British Antarctic Survey
September 9, 2024
Cambridge researchers are set to explore the uncharted depths of life in the extreme cold, with findings that could reshape our understanding of biology and pave the way for future scientific breakthroughs.
The initiative, a collaboration led by British Antarctic Survey (BAS) with the Department of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology (CEB), will develop novel microscopy techniques to observe living cells at subzero temperatures – a feat never before achieved.
The project is announced today (Monday 2 September) as part of UKRI’s new interdisciplinary scheme, and is one of 36 projects that will share £32.4m from the first round of UKRI’s new cross research council responsive mode pilot scheme, designed to stimulate exciting new interdisciplinary research.
The team aims to study dynamic live cell imaging at sub-zero temperatures, to break new ground in fields such as biotechnology and climate science. The research holds the potential to open up entirely new avenues of study, and offer insights that could have far-reaching implications across multiple scientific disciplines.
“By exploring the uncharted territory of cold biology, we are not only advancing science but also addressing some of the most urgent challenges of our time,” said Professor Melody Clark, joint Principal Investigator from BAS. “This work has the potential to reshape our understanding of life and its resilience, offering hope in the face of global environmental change.”
“Understanding how life functions in extreme cold is not just a scientific curiosity; it’s a necessity in the face of the accelerating climate crisis,” said Clemens Kaminski, Head of Department at CEB and joint Principal Investigator of the project.
“Our research will provide crucial insights into how organisms survive in some of the harshest environments on Earth, which could help us protect these ecosystems as they face unprecedented threats.”
The focus of the study will be on proteins, which are essential molecules responsible for various cellular tasks. Although protein behaviour is well understood at higher temperatures, much remains unknown about their function in extreme cold. This research aims to bridge that gap by examining Antarctic species, such as the fish Harpagifer antarcticus, using specially adapted imaging tools for cold environments.
“The interdisciplinary nature of this project – spanning biology, physics, engineering, and chemistry – underscores its potential to make far-reaching contributions to science,” added Kaminski. “By developing new technologies to study life at subzero temperatures, we are opening doors to discoveries that could have profound implications for everything from conservation efforts to medical advancements.”
As the polar regions warm and biodiversity faces increasing pressures, understanding life in these fragile environments becomes ever more critical. The findings from this research could inform strategies to mitigate the impacts of climate change, preserve biodiversity, and even guide the development of new biotechnological applications.
When awarding the project with funding, the UKRI were impressed by the strength of the team in working together to produce an ‘exciting, boundary-pushing’ proposal as well as impressive preliminary studies underwriting the success of the proposed work. The panel noted the previous attempts to receive funding for the project, which had proved difficult due to the inter-disciplinary nature, but felt it is a ‘timely and urgent proposal given climate change’.
https://astrobiology.com/2024/09/through-ice-acoustic-communication-for-ocean-worlds-exploration.html
Through-Ice Acoustic Communication For Ocean Worlds Exploration
By Keith Cowing
Status Report
via PubMed
September 22, 2024
Subsurface exploration of ice-covered planets and moons presents communications challenges because of the need to communicate through kilometers of ice. The objective of this task is to develop the capability to wirelessly communicate through kilometers of ice and thus complement the potentially failure-prone tethers deployed behind an ice-penetrating probe on Ocean Worlds.
In this paper, the preliminary work on the development of wireless deep-ice communication is presented and discussed.
The communication test and acoustic attenuation measurements in ice have been made by embedding acoustic transceivers in glacial ice at the Matanuska Glacier, Anchorage, Alaska. Field test results show that acoustic communication is viable through ice, demonstrating the transmission of data and image files in the 13–18 kHz band over 100 m.
The results suggest that communication over many kilometers of ice thickness could be feasible by employing reduced transmitting frequencies around 1 kHz, though future work is needed to better constrain the likely acoustic attenuation properties through a refrozen borehole.
Through-Ice Acoustic Communication for Ocean Worlds Exploration Sensors (Basel). 2024 May; 24(9): 2776.
Published online 2024 Apr 26. doi: 10.3390/s24092776 via PubMed (open access)
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11086343/