(credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech) (credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)
Posted on 03/12/2015 2:27:53 PM PDT by BenLurkin
Larger than the planet Mercury, Ganymede is one of four moons discovered by Galileo in 1610, easily visible in small telescope and large binoculars. The subsurface ocean confirmed by Hubble is believed to be at least 60 miles thick, containing more water than all of Earth's ocean's combined.
As such, Ganymede joins a growing list of planets and moons in Earth's solar system, including Jupiter's moon Europa and Saturn's moon Enceladus, that are known to harbor vast reservoirs of liquid water.
The latest findings using the Hubble Space Telescope build on earlier observations by NASA's Galileo spacecraft that showed Ganymede has a magnetic field generated by an iron core and two bands of aurora that are created when electrically charged particles captured in the field crash into the moon's extremely thin oxygen atmosphere.
(Excerpt) Read more at cbsnews.com ...
But hows the fishing?
With comets, asteroid near misses and the like, I was just thinking that it would be nice to have humanity with some outposts off this planet.
While this would not be the easiest, it is good to know that there are other sources of H2O out there without as big a lifting force for orbit as Earth.
Can’t we send up a probe that will collect water samples and bring them back to earth?
Enceledus and Europa are also watery.
I'd just as soon we park them in low-Earth orbit and work on there, if you don't mind.
And so is Neptune’s Triton, and now maybe Ceres.
ALL THESE WORLDS
ARE YOURS EXCEPT
EUROPA
ATTEMPT NO
LANDING THERE
USE THEM TOGETHER
USE THEM IN PEACE
Its kind of funny that a fair portion of sci fi shows have aliens coming to earth to steal our water when the reality is that we’re pretty dry and water is pretty abundant in space and apparently throughout our solar system.
Don’t they have editors any more?
They could say sub-surface and would be correct,
underground not so much.
Oh well...
Let’s send this administration up to explore it.
Poor wording does as much damage to good science as global warming alarmists do.
One that irritates me lately is the statement that the Dawn spacecraft is “orbiting” Ceres. Its not orbiting. Its currently traveling parallel with Ceres some 38,000 miles beyond the orbit of Ceres and will enter actual orbit early next month.
(NASA eyes on the solar system is a great tool for visualizing where these craft are and where they are headed.)
Ice fishiing is a thinly veiled excuse for drinking.
“Its kind of funny that a fair portion of sci fi shows have aliens coming to earth to steal our water when the reality is that we’re pretty dry and water is pretty abundant in space and apparently throughout our solar system.”
That’s because the aliens stole our water, duh.
I formally claim Ganymede as mine!
Not to mention the asteroid belt has such massive amounts of material, any real alien power could harvest them all.
Another is that if some alien race has all this power and technology, why can’t they master basic chemistry?
Too late... the Palestinians have already claimed it as the 7th holiest site of Islam.
Hydrogen and Helium are the most abundant elements in the universe with oxygen ranking at number 3. With all that hydrogen and oxygen an advanced race should have no problem making all the water they need.
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