Icy Moons Are Ocean Worlds

miohtama

TIL > The radiation environment around Europa is punishing; an astronaut standing on the surface would get a fatal dose in about a day

pvaldes

Beautifully designed article. Very cool images and diagrams. > We want rocks in contact with water, But there is ice compressed between the water column and the xenoceanic bottom, ok. I see the problem. What about rocks in the surface of the water?. Some volcanic rocks can float.

exhilaration

Great read, other than Europa I wasn't aware of these other candidate ocean moons.

merek

Set your calendars: Europa Clipper, launched 2024, starts Europa flybys on March 2031 Dragonfly, hopefully launching July 2028, arriving on Titan 2034 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Europa_Clipper https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragonfly_(Titan_space_probe)

yellowapple

> This remarkable transformation in our understanding is the result of just three missions: Voyager, Galileo, and Cassini—along with some computer modeling and hard staring by the Hubble and Webb space telescopes. Seems odd to neglect to mention New Horizons immediately after mentioning the probable existence of liquid oceans under Pluto's surface, a finding made possible thanks primarily to New Horizons.