Title: Detecting Europa’s water plumes
Speaker: Hans Huybrighs, Space And Planetary Science Institute, Khalifa University, UAE
Abstract: Europa is a fascinating icy moon of Jupiter which harbors a potentially habitable subsurface ocean. Recent observations with Hubble (Roth et al., 2014), Keck (Paganini et al., 2019) and magnetic field measurements by Galileo (Jia et al., 2018) suggest that active water plumes exist on Europa. Such plumes might allow us to directly sample the ocean without having to penetrate the icy surface. In this presentation I will demonstrate how unexploited energetic proton data from the historic Galileo mission can also be used to infer the existence of plumes (Huybrighs et al., 2020; 2021) and discuss candidate signatures. I will also present how ESA’s Jupiter ICy moon Explorer (JUICE) can detect plume particles with its in-situ particle detectors (Huybrighs et al., 2017; Winterhalder and Huybrighs 2022).
When: Wednesday, October 19, 2022 at 14:00.
Location: Meridian Room or online https://observatory.webex.com/observatory/j.php?MTID=m98e411eae0ce1bdd3495d4a95ef5bd8c
