Unraveling the mystery of water beyond Earth: Ground-penetrating radar will search for water bodies on Jupiter

Finding water on the solar system’s distant planets and moons is a challenge, especially when instruments are thousands of kilometers from the surface, but scientists speaking at the European Geosciences Union conference describe how ground-penetrating radar can be used to find bodies of water on distant planetary surfaces The water below is on its way to Jupiter.

The first clue to finding life on other planets is the search for liquid water. Moons of Saturn and Jupiter, such as Enceladus, Ganymede, Europa and Callisto, are suspected of harboring oceans of liquid water beneath their icy crusts. Likewise, some exoplanets outside our solar system may have liquid water, which would be critical for habitability. But detecting water poses a challenge when we don’t have physical access to these objects. Ice-penetrating radar is a geophysical tool that has been proven capable of detecting liquid water on Earth and under the South Pole Cap of Mars.

The instrument is now aboard the JUICE spacecraft en route to Jupiter’s icy moon Ganymede, and will also be aboard the Europa Clipper spacecraft launching to Europa later this year. What can we learn from these tasks? Dr. Elena Pettinelli of the University of Rome Tre has extensive experience in using ice-breaking radar for planetary exploration, and she will delve into the practicality of this technology in a presentation at EGU24, the European Geosciences Union conference next week.

Dr. Pettinelli, who was part of the team that discovered stable liquid water beneath the ice on Mars, will trace the historical use of ice-breaking radar in planetary exploration and then delve into the potential use of ice-breaking radar for localization and characterization. .

Scientists hope to use ice-penetrating radar to determine the depth and chemical composition of water beneath the icy surfaces of Jupiter’s moons. Dr. Pettinelli explained that the radar’s penetration depth is related to ice salinity. Ice with a higher salt content blocks radar transmissions to a greater extent. “Based on the behavior of radio waves, we might be able to better understand the distribution of salt,” she said. Her team then determined this through laboratory experiments.

“We can use all this information to improve our understanding of the distribution of liquid water in the solar system,” Dr. Pettinelli said. “There’s a lot more water than we thought 20 or 30 years ago, and it’s really interesting to use this technology to try to understand where the water might be.”