Astronomers have detected signs of water vapor in the atmosphere of Ganymede, Jupiter’s largest moon, from the study of archival images from the Hubble Space Telescope, announced yesterday by the European Space Agency (ESA), which operates the telescope.
“The water vapor [na atmosfera] that we are now measuring comes from the sublimation of ice caused by the thermal leakage of water vapor from the regions. [da superfície gelada] warmer,” said, quoted in an ESA statement, the team coordinator, Lorenz Roth, of the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden.
According to the study, published in the scientific journal Nature Astronomy, the temperature on the surface of Ganymede, the ninth largest celestial body in the Solar System, “varies strongly throughout the day and, around noon, near the equator, it can be make it hot enough for the icy surface to release some small amounts of water molecules.”
Water, in its liquid state, is a fundamental condition for life as it is known. Identifying it on other worlds “is crucial” to the search for habitable planets beyond Earth, says the ESA statement, noting that Ganymede “may hold more water than all of Earth’s oceans”.
However, temperatures on Jupiter’s moon, the solar system’s largest, “are so cold that the water on the surface freezes and the ocean is about 160 kilometers below the crust,” says ESA, which plans to send a satellite in 2022 to study Jupiter and the moons Europa, Ganymede and Callisto, where scientists think there may be liquid water under surface ice.
The satellite will take eight years to reach the orbit of the “gas giant”, and it is expected that, during three and a half years, it will make detailed observations of the planet, in particular of its turbulent atmosphere, and of the three moons, which could eventually orbit Ganymede, the biggest and brightest.
According to ESA, Ganymede “provides a natural laboratory for analyzing the nature, evolution and potential habitability of icy worlds in general” and stands out for “the role it plays within the Galilean satellite system and its magnetic and magnetic interactions. plasma with Jupiter and its environment”.
The European mission to Jupiter has Portuguese participation, by the aerospace company Active Space Technologies, which will build the operating mechanism for the satellite antenna that will allow data collection and transmission to Earth.
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