Liquid water is an important piece of what makes for a habitable world, but far from the only requirement for life. And these oceans are not small – Europa’s ocean alone might have more than double the water of all of Earth’s oceans combined.Īn obvious and tantalizing next question is whether these oceans can support extraterrestrial life. Using this technique, planetary scientists have been able to show that the three moons contain underground oceans. So as these moons travel through Jupiter’s magnetic field, they generate a secondary, smaller magnetic field that signals to researchers the presence of an underground ocean. The best evidence of these oceans comes from Jupiter’s magnetic field. While the exact depths are still uncertain, scientists are confident that these oceans exist. Exactly how far down this transition occurs on each of the moons is a subject of debate that scientists hope to resolve with JUICE and Europa Clipper. Go down far enough and you eventually reach the temperature where ice melts into water. At these temperatures, ice behaves like solid rock.īut just like Earth, the deeper underground you go on these moons, the hotter it gets. NASA/JPL-Caltech/Michael Carroll Ocean worldsĮuropa, Ganymede and Callisto have chilly surfaces that are hundreds of degrees below zero. Warmth from Europa’s interior and tidal energy from Jupiter likely maintain a massive liquid ocean beneath the moon’s icy surface. Most exciting of all: Europa, Ganymede and Callisto all almost certainly possess underground oceans of liquid water. Callisto appears somewhat inert compared to the others, but serves as a valuable time capsule of an ancient past that is no longer accessible on the youthful surfaces of Europa and Io. Ganymede, the largest moon in the entire solar system, is bigger than Mercury and has its own magnetic field generated internally from a liquid metal core. Europa’s surface is a frozen wonderland with a young but complex history, possibly including icy analogs of plate tectonics and volcanoes. But it is not home to large amounts of water.Įuropa, Ganymede and Callisto, in contrast, have icy landscapes. These missions and other observations revealed that Io, the closest of the four to its host planet, is abuzz with geological activity, including lava lakes, volcanic eruptions and tectonically formed mountains. The Juno mission is still orbiting Jupiter today and has provided scientists with an unprecedented view into Jupiter’s composition, structure and space environment. The Galileo mission orbited Jupiter from 1995 to 2003 and led to geological discoveries on all four large moons. Two previous NASA missions have sent spacecraft to orbit the Jupiter system and collected data on these moons. The downside is that so much energy would go into building the thing in the first place, I'm not sure it would be worth it.Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto are, like Earth’s Moon, relatively large, spherical complex worlds. But a Planet-Large Moon system, maybe it could work. You'd also need a large moon, otherwise the orbit would circularize and energy would diminish. I have no idea if it would be practical at all, but it's theoretically possible. ![]() Whether such a thing is practical is another question. ![]() The amount of electricity would depend on the mass and size and flexibility of the spherical construct and the energy would come from a nearly limitless source - the planet's rotational energy. The stretching back and forth and the mass of the outer shell of this object could pull pistons and make electricity. In theory, a devise could be built using material and mass asteroids and carbon fiber cables, and some kind of structure where there was a spherical outside that stretches and squishes in an orbit, ideally, like Io, between the planet and it's large moon where some eccentricity and variation would be maintained. Jupiter works, or, an outer planet, maybe even the theoretical Planet 9, where solar-energy panels would be pretty pointless, Uranium fuel might be scarce and 3He takes time to collect for fusion, so they need a power source. Lets say we have a colony far from the Sun. In terms of "Magic Energy" (I hate the word magic, lets say free energy)
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