The Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (JUICE) left Earth a year ago to begin a mission to explore Jupiter’s potential ocean moons Ganymede, Callisto, and Europa in detail.
Water is a vital component for life on Earth, so learning more about its distribution on these moons and other moons such as Saturn’s moon Enceladus could tell us about whether these ocean worlds could harbor life, at least life as we know it. .
However, scientists cannot yet penetrate the icy shells of Ganymede, Callisto and Europa; This means that they have not yet been able to determine the composition and properties of the relevant water bodies. In fact, scientists cannot even confirm the existence of these oceans yet. On the bright side, a workaround can be found with JUICE.
Without physical access to subsurface oceans, JUICE relies on radar to see deeper into these icy moons. This is a type of ice-penetrating radar that will offer the next best research method for assessing buried seas and therefore the habitability of these moons. And last week, scientists revealed a little more about the advanced ice-penetrating radar system JUICE will use.
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“We can use all this information to improve our understanding of the distribution of liquid water in the solar system,” Elena Pettinelli from Roma Tre University said in a statement. said. “There’s a lot more water than we thought 20 or 30 years ago, and it’s really interesting to use this technique to try to understand where water might be.”
looking under the ice
JUICE, which will arrive in the Jovian system in July 2031, will observe Jupiter’s magnetic fields and atmosphere, as well as its moons and faint ring system. According to spacecraft operators at the European Space Agency (ESA), the theme of this research is the emergence of habitable worlds around gas giants.
To conduct these operations, JUICE carries a suite of 10 state-of-the-art scientific instruments. One of these is, of course, ice-penetrating radar. It’s called the Icy Moon Reconnaissance Radar (RIME) and can examine the subsurface structure of Jupiter’s icy moons to a depth of about 5.6 miles (9 kilometers). RIME’s main objectives will be to characterize Ganymede as a planetary object and possibly a habitable world, to study recently active regions of Europa, and to confirm whether Callisto is a remnant of the early Jovian system.
The JUICE team hopes that RIME these satellites will also be able to determine the depth of oceans beneath ice crusts and unravel the chemistry of any water that might contain such liquid bodies. These two things are interconnected; Pettinelli notes that the depth of radar penetration on icy moons will depend on the salinity or salinity of the water. The salt interferes with the transmission of radar signals, meaning important information can be revealed to the team through a form of reverse inference.
JUICE also carries systems similar to RIME; These include those that have already been tested on Earth for the detection of liquid water. Far from our planet, the first planetary subsurface radar, known as the Apollo Lunar Sounder Experiment, was tested on the moon during the Apollo 17 mission. Pettinelli was part of a team that used radars installed on the Mars Orbiter Reconnaissance to discover the presence of liquid water even farther away, at Mars’ south pole.
It is also currently developing, together with the ESA mission Envision, a radar system that will be carried to Venus, the second planet from the sun and the hottest world in the solar system. Envision will be the first project to explore Venus from its inner core to its upper atmosphere, observing the interactions between the hellish planet’s different layers, including its atmosphere, surface, subsurface and interior. The mission aims to provide a more comprehensive view of Venus by outlining the planet’s history, activities and general climate.
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Envision will carry two radar systems: Ground Radar Sounder (SRS) and High Frequency (HF) sounding radar. Both will be used to investigate the top 0.6 miles (1 kilometer) of Venus’ subsurface. This will help scientists build a better picture of the climate history of the planet often called “Earth’s twin.”
Pettinelli presented a more comprehensive picture of the use of RIME and other planetary radars at the Geosciences Union EGU24 General Assembly on April 19.