NASA Just Detected Water Vapor On Jupiters Moon Ganymede — What It Means

NASA Just Detected Water Vapor On Jupiter’s Moon Ganymede — What It Means

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Jupiter’s moons are back in the news. After revisiting images of Ganymede, NASA has confirmed the existence of water vapor in its atmosphere.

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NASA Just Detected Water Vapor On Jupiters Moon Ganymede — What It Means

NASA recently made a huge discovery about Jupiter’s moon Ganymede, confirming that water vapor exists in its atmosphere. This is just the latest piece of major news NASA has revealed lately, with the space agency making multiple accomplishments in a pretty short amount of time. Within the past month, NASA has revived its Hubble telescope after a month-long outage, used seismic data to look deep inside Mars, and announced its Lucy mission that will carry a message for future humans into outer space.

As for Jupiter-related news, this discovery of Ganymede is the second story regarding one of Jupiter’s moons within the past week. On July 23, NASA announced it was partnering with SpaceX to explore Europa. While Jupiter itself is an uninhabitable gas giant, some of its 79 moons have shown potential signs of water, life, and more. That’s why scientists are so interested in learning more about Europa, but thanks to this latest information about Ganymede, it might have more to offer than initially expected.

On July 26, NASA announced that it had found evidence of water vapor within Ganymede’s atmosphere. This is the first time any such discovery has been made on Ganymede, marking a big step forward in astronomers’ understanding of the largest known moon in the entire solar system. NASA originally captured UV images of Ganymede in 1998 using the Hubble telescope. At the time, discrepancies in the images led scientists to believe that Ganymede didn’t have a pure O2 atmosphere and likely had higher atomic oxygen levels. After revisiting the images, however, NASA and Lorenz Roth from KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm found that Ganymede actually has very little atomic oxygen. It turns out that Ganymede’s surface temperature changes considerably during the day. When this happens, NASA describes that “it may become sufficiently warm that the ice surface releases some small amounts of water molecules.” Furthermore, the discrepancies scientists found in 1998 “are directly correlated with where water would be expected in the moon’s atmosphere.”

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What This Discovery Of Ganymede Really Means

Learning that Ganymede has water vapor in its atmosphere is certainly interesting, but why does any of this matter in the first place? Speaking to The Register, astronomer Randy Gladstone says, “It’s a subtle effect, but it allows us to confirm that the models are correct, and gives us confidence that we understand Ganymede’s atmosphere pretty well.” He goes on to say, “It’s also sort of interesting that the major species in Ganymede’s atmosphere changes from H2O at around noon to O2 at other times of day.” Similar to Europa, Ganymede is believed to have vast oceans beneath its icy, frozen surface. Due to Ganymede’s larger size, however, Ganymede likely contains more water than all of Earth’s oceans combined.

So, where do scientists go from here? While NASA plans to dig deeper into Europa in 2024, the European Space Agency is planning its JUICE (JUpiter ICy moons Explorer) mission for launch in 2022. Once it arrives at Jupiter in 2029, JUICE will spend its time exploring Jupiter itself and three of its biggest moons — including Ganymede. This latest discovery gives scientists another element to study when that mission begins, further helping the world learn as much as it can about these frozen, fascinating moons.

Link Source : https://screenrant.com/jupiter-ganymede-moon-water-vapor-nasa-discovery/

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