Europa, certainly one of Jupiter’s 95 moons, generates 1,000 tons of oxygen each 24 hours, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory stated Monday.
It is sufficient oxygen to maintain 1,000,000 people respiration every day, nevertheless it’s considerably lower than scientists beforehand believed existed, researchers stated. The quantity of oxygen might influence the moon’s underground ocean, which is believed to comprise twice as a lot water as all of Earth’s oceans mixed.
Europa, the sixth-closest moon to Jupiter, is barely smaller than Earth’s moon, in accordance with NASA. Like Earth, Europa is believed to have a rocky mantle and an iron core.
The findings, revealed Monday within the journal Nature Astronomy, present Europa’s producing round 26 kilos of oxygen each second. Scientists beforehand estimated that the moon might be producing greater than 2,000 kilos of oxygen each second.
The most recent estimate was made based mostly on the quantity of hydrogen being launched from Europa’s floor. The information was gathered by NASA’s area probe Juno, which flew by Europa in 2022.
“Juno introduced a brand new functionality to instantly measure the composition of charged particles shed from Europa’s environment, and we could not wait to additional peek behind the scenes of this thrilling water world,” lead creator James Szalay of Princeton College stated. “However what we did not understand is that Juno’s observations would give us such a decent constraint on the quantity of oxygen produced in Europa’s icy floor.”
Although the planet has oxygen, it would not essentially be a secure place for people — and never simply due to a scarcity of breathable air.
NASA/JPL-Caltech
“The query of human exploration at Europa is a really advanced one,” Szalay stated in an e mail. “The radiation is extraordinarily intense at Europa and estimates counsel an astronaut inside an area swimsuit wouldn’t be capable to survive greater than a day on the floor solely resulting from this intense radiation. So that they’d in all probability have even greater issues than oxygen in such an atmosphere.”
NASA’s Juno, launched in 2011, has been probing Jupiter since 2016.
“Figuring out the quantity of water – and subsequently oxygen – within the fuel big is essential not just for understanding how the planet fashioned, but additionally how heavy parts had been transferred throughout the photo voltaic system,” in accordance with NASA’s Juno mission. “These heavy parts had been essential for the existence of rocky planets like Earth – and life.”
“Since Jupiter is one of the best instance of a fuel big that we have now, studying its historical past will assist us perceive the tons of of big planets we have found orbiting different stars,” the mission added.
NASA plans to launch Europa Clipper on Oct. 10, 2024, to conduct “detailed reconnaissance of Jupiter’s moon Europa and examine whether or not the icy moon might harbor circumstances appropriate for all times.”
The area company says that Europa “will be the most promising place in our photo voltaic system to search out present-day environments appropriate for some type of life past Earth.”