Author: Jennifer Leman / Source: Science News
Europa’s frozen landscape could be treacherous territory for future lunar landers.
Jagged spires of ice may stud the Jovian moon’s equator, researchers report October 8 in Nature Geosciences. These structures, called penitentes, could reach heights of 15 meters and occur roughly every 7.
5 meters, computer simulations show, potentially rendering parts the moon unnavigable in future missions.“All kinds of interesting things might be on the surface” of Europa, says Jeff Moore, a planetary geologist at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif. “You’d want to know about them if you wanted to send a lander.”
Penitentes on Earth are sculpted through a process called sublimation, where sunlight transforms snow or ice in a dry environment into water vapor without first melting it. As parts of the snow or ice sublimate quicker than others, surface depressions form. Those spots concentrate sunlight, speeding up the sublimation process there even more and carving the icy blades.
On Earth, these ice spires grow at high altitudes in the tropics and subtropics where conditions are just right: Penitentes require abundant sunlight, cold temperatures that don’t allow melting and still air, since the ice is easily eroded.
The structures haven’t been directly observed on Europa because the resolution of current imagery is so low. “The best pictures we have of…
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