NASA has announced plans to send their first probe designed to detect life to Europa – one of the likeliest homes of alien existence in our solar system.
Turns out the probe is following in the footsteps of a Centretown high school that has already carried out its own mission to Jupiter’s icy moon.
The Ottawa-Carleton Educational Space Simulation, better known as Spacesim and run since 1988 out of Lisgar Collegiate Institute, has already “travelled” to Europa. Twice.
And these weren’t just space robots speeding through the solar system, as planned by NASA; they were flesh and blood people. Of course, Spacesim’s “Europa” is located in a building on Albert Street in downtown Ottawa, where the student participants in the program build a habitat and embark on 120-hour simulated space missions.
And Spacesim’s record of achievement hasn’t exactly been perfect: Lisgar, we have a problem.
“We’ve lost entire crews once or twice,” says Jim Magwood, a science teacher at Lisgar who also runs the Spacesim program. Still, Magwood says he’s proud of the accomplishments of Spacesim, and hopeful that NASA robots will have better luck exploring Europa. Due to threats of impending doom (the Lisgar crew had a malfunction in a rocket and lost fuel), the intrepid astronauts of the last Spacesim visit to Europa were unable to carry out the research intended to find life.
“From our perspective,” Magwood said , “(Europa) is still a likely candidate that living things might be found.”
Europa is one of Jupiter’s 63 known moons. It is essentially a massive snowball, with a surface made up almost entirely of ice.
What makes Europa special, however, is that due to Jupiter’s immense gravity (Jupiter is about 317 times more massive than Earth, and 2.5 times more massive than all other planets in our solar system combined) Europa is being pumped by the energy of Jupiter’s pull, warming it and allowing for liquid water to flow underneath Europa’s one-kilometre-thick ice shell. The liquid water is believed to have been there for billions of years, providing a potentially habitable environment for life.
And Europa’s connection to Canada doesn’t end with Spacesim; the Canadian Arctic has been a gold mine for scientists looking to find comparable environments to Europa.
Steve Grasby, an Alberta-based geoscientist with the Centretown-headquartered Geological Survey of Canada, has performed research in the Canadian Arctic relating to Europa. Finding yellow patches in the snow that reeked of rotten eggs, Grasby and his colleagues discovered that the cause was sulphur being shot up from two kilometres within the Earth, a phenomena unlike anywhere else on this planet, but fairly common on Europa.
To make things even better, Grasby and others discovered that small microorganisms were living off the sulphur, furthering the possibility for life to reside in Europa’s ice.
“The mantra is: you go where the water is,” Grasby told Centretown News. “It’s hard to know if there is life on Europa at all or, if there was, what type of life it might be. What we do know . . . is (that Europa) has this ice-covered shell and there is abundant sulphur compounds on the ice.”
This knowledge, coupled with the strong energy gradient in the ocean from the gravitational stress, is what’s so exciting about Europa; it checks a lot of life’s boxes.
Scientists have discovered carbon compounds – the “building blocks of life” – on Europa, but nothing beyond that so far, Grasby says.
The radiation on the surface is far too high to allow for living organisms, or at least any of the sort we’ve encountered on Earth, which is why NASA will likely have to find a way to burrow within the ice to identify signs of life.
Grasby’s research in this area involved testing whether it would be possible to find organisms by identifying the sulphur patches with special satellite sensors. He found that it was in fact possible, and published his findings in a 2012 issue of the science journal Astrobiology.
Although Grasby warns that there are “dramatic differences” between Europa and the Arctic, he still believes that “today (Europa) has all the best characteristics that would give you the best potential for a place for life.”
U.S. science guru Neil deGrasse Tyson has said that he is a “life fan” of Europa on his radio show Startalk.
Tyson, however, finds a problem; should scientists encounter aliens on Europa, what do they call them? It’s hardly as if “Europians” is available.
Spacesim headed away from Europa for their most recent mission, which took place over Valentine’s Day weekend. Instead, they explored Saturn’s moon Hyperion.
NASA has yet to confirm any plans for Hyperion, but if history is any indication, a probe may not be too far behind the Centretown crew.