Carbon copy (9/21/23)

Good afternoon, and happy Thursday. The Economist is hosting its first Space Economy Summit Oct. 11-12 in LA + virtually, and I (as well as a few other esteemed members of the Payload team) will be participating. We’ll be helping facilitate the conversation about how we can use space tech to benefit those of us down on Earth.

Rocket Lab CEO Peter Beck, Deputy Commerce Secretary Don Graves, Voyager Space CEO Dylan Taylor, NASA JPL director Laurie Leshin, XPRIZE Foundation founder Peter Diamandis, and NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei have all signed on to speak. You can register here for the summit.

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What Lies Beneath the Surface

Scientists have uncovered a rare clue about the composition of a subsurface ocean on one of the most promising candidates in the hunt for life elsewhere in the solar system.

In results published today in the journal Science, two independent teams of astronomers used JWST observations of Europa, a moon of Jupiter, and found CO2 that looks like it came from the salty ocean shrouded beneath the moon’s thick, icy shell. The tidbit of information about what may lie beneath the surface will help researchers to plan for future missions to Europa to probe the planet for that holy grail of planetary science—life.

CO2 who? In 2019, researchers observing Europa data collected by NASA’s Voyager and Galileo interplanetary probes found sodium chloride (i.e., table salt) in a region of the moon called Tara Regio.

• Tara Regio is notable for its chaos—that is, there’s a lot of geologic turnover, and as such, the elements on the surface there have had less exposure to the outside world above the sea than older regions of Europa.

• The finding of sodium chloride hinted that the sea beneath the icy surface might actually be more like Earth’s oceans than researchers previously understood.

Now, two studies have identified CO2 in Tara Regio. Since it was found in this geologically new region, chances are higher that it came from underneath the ice rather than from an external source like a meteoroid impact. The researchers noted that it’s also possible that carbon churned up from the depths and became CO2 on the surface—but, either way, the ocean contains carbon.

Probing Europa: The salty ocean under Europa’s ice is one of the only places in the solar system where water is consistently stable in liquid form—a state which has been essential for Earth’s life to form. In the coming years, a few dedicated missions will attempt to probe through the ice crust to determine for sure whether there is life in that ocean.

ESA launched its JUpiter ICy moons Explorer (JUICE) mission in April on a journey to study Jupiter and its three ocean-bearing moons (Europa, Ganymede and Callisto). Coming up, NASA will launch Europa Clipper, the first mission ever specifically dedicated to studying the moon.

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Other News from the Cosmos

• OSIRIS-REx has completed its final adjustment burn and is returning to Earth in three days.

• Ingenuity, aka the little Mars helicopter that could, has completed 58 flights.

• ISRO used a rocket-propelled sled to test the parachutes it plans to use to safely return crew to the Earth’s surface.

• Thermal moonquakes detected during Apollo 17 may have actually been caused by slight expansions and contractions of the mission’s lander base.

• Supermassive black holes at the center of galaxies may have a direct impact on the chemical makeup of those galaxies.

• Analysis of Mars’ gravity provides additional evidence that there was once a vast ocean across the northern hemisphere.

• Black holes may gobble up matter faster than expected.

• Electrons that escape the Earth’s magnetic field may be contributing to weathering—and even the formation of water—on the Moon.

• Astronauts that embark on long-duration space missions often experience a drop in bone density, but a synthetic chemical called NELL-1 tested in mice on the ISS could help them to retain it.

The View from Space

Royal Museums Greenwich has published the winners of its annual Astronomy Photographer of the Year competition. The winner of the stars and nebulae category captured this deep stellar remnant nicknamed “the heart of the hydra.”