[Lift off of Juno spacecraft on rocket]
Jamey Szalay (interview): “We revealed a key piece in the story of Europa’s interaction with its environment. How much oxygen gets produced in the ice. Before Juno flew by Europa. There are very broad constraints on how much that was, anywhere from a few kilograms per sect over 1000. We’ve constrained it to a very narrow range on the order of 12kg per second.”
[Image made available by NASA shows the complex, ice-covered surface of Jupiter’s moon Europa, captured by NASA’s Juno spacecraft during a flyby]
[Image made available by NASA shows the complex, ice-covered surface of Jupiter’s moon Europa, captured by NASA’s Juno spacecraft during a flyby]
[Image provided by NASA shows a composite image of possible water plumes on the south pole of Jupiter’s moon Europa. The Hubble data were taken on January 26, 2014. The image of Europa, superimposed on the Hubble data, is assembled from data from the Galileo and Voyager missions.]
[Animation of Juno Probe approaching Jupiter]
[Close of Juno Probe wrapped in silver foil at Lockheed Martin Space Systems plant where NASA’s Juno spacecraft was built and was being prepared for shipment to NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida]
[Juno Probe in clean room]
Jamey Szalay (interview): “In our study, we determined the total amount of oxygen produced in the ice. And this is a really important quantity, because that tells us how much oxygen can leave the surface to the atmosphere, how much gets stuck in the ice, and how much goes to the ocean. All of that is… the sum of that has to be the total amount that that we found in the current epoch. And so in the sense our derived amount of oxygen that we found is an upper limit to the total amount that could make its way to the ocean in the current time frame as a source of potential metabolic energy for life.”
[Animation of Juno Probe approaching Jupiter]
[Animation sequences show NASA’s Europa Clipper spacecraft mission leaving Earth, deploying in space and journeying to the Jupiter system – it will then perform multiple flybys of the icy moon Europa]
[This image provided by NASA, processed by Kevin M. Gill, shows Jupiter’s moon Europa captured by the Juno spacecraft on Sept. 29, 2022]
This script was provided by The Associated Press.