NASA's Juno Mission Is Able To Refine Our Estimate, On Oxygen Produced Daily -- At Icy Moon Europa: ~1,000 Tons Per Day...

As we've indicated many times before, we are privileged to be alive at a time of near-daily discoveries -- in the space sciences, as our advancing technology peels back the cover of darkness that previously obscured our "knowings".

This time, it comes from around mighty Jupiter, and its potentially-life supporting moon Europa -- where a subsurface ocean may be naturally-packed with lots of oxygen, as a result of natural ionization in the surface ice shell, and its plumes, which are blasted by Jupiter's vast plasma/radiation fields. Here's the latest:

. . .Scientists with NASA’s Juno mission to Jupiter have calculated the rate of oxygen being produced at the Jovian moon Europa to be substantially less than most previous studies. Published on March 4 in Nature Astronomy, the findings were derived by measuring hydrogen outgassing from the icy moon’s surface using data collected by the spacecraft’s Jovian Auroral Distributions Experiment (JADE) instrument.

The paper’s authors estimate the amount of oxygen produced to be around 26 pounds every second (12 kilograms per second). Previous estimates range from a few pounds to over 2,000 pounds per second (over 1,000 kilograms per second). Scientists believe that some of the oxygen produced in this manner could work its way into the moon’s subsurface ocean as a possible source of metabolic energy.

With an equatorial diameter of 1,940 miles (3,100 kilometers), Europa is the fourth largest of Jupiter’s 95 known moons and the smallest of the four Galilean satellites. Scientists believe a vast internal ocean of salty water lurks beneath its icy crust, and they are curious about the potential for life-supporting conditions to exist below the surface. . . .

“Europa is like an ice ball slowly losing its water in a flowing stream. Except, in this case, the stream is a fluid of ionized particles swept around Jupiter by its extraordinary magnetic field,” said JADE scientist Jamey Szalay from Princeton University in New Jersey. “When these ionized particles impact Europa, they break up the water-ice molecule by molecule on the surface to produce hydrogen and oxygen. In a way, the entire ice shell is being continuously eroded by waves of charged particles washing up upon it. . . .”

Now you know -- onward grinning up, some 500 million miles into the night sky, at Lord Jupiter and its shepherded moons.

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