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More Proof That Europa Is A Bizarre Place
posted: 02:22 pm ET
01 October 1999
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europa_acid_991001The Galileo spacecraft has found evidence of sulfuric acid on Jupiter's icy moon Europa, but scientists aren't sure where it's coming from. A team of scientists led by Robert Carlson of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory announced the discovery in the Oct. 1 issue of the journal Science after analyzing data from the spacecraft's near-infrared mapping spectrometer, which can be used to identify chemicals based on their absorption of infrared light. The results showed that much of the moon is covered with frozen sulfuric acid, a corrosive chemical found most commonly in battery acid and in Earth's acid rain. "This demonstrates once again that Europa is a really bizarre place," Carlson said. "Sulfuric acid occurs in nature, but it isn't plentiful. You're not likely to find sulfuric acid on Earth's beaches, but on Europa, it covers large portions of the surface." Now that the chemical has been identified, the team is trying to figure out where it's coming from. One theory proposed by Carlson is that the sulfur actually comes from Io, another of Jupiter's moons. Volcanoes on Io eject sulfur atoms into the magnetic environment around Jupiter, from where it could be projected toward Europa. Another scientist who worked on the project, Robert Johnson from the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, suggests that the sulfuric acid may be generated by sodium and magnesium sulfates that leached onto Europa's surface from underground oceans and were then altered by the moon's intense radiation field. A third theory is that the sulfuric acid is being ejected from Europa's interior by geysers or oozing up through cracks in the ice. Carlson, Johnson and co-author Mark Anderson, a chemist in JPL's Analytical Chemistry Laboratory, plan to study Jupiter's largest moon, Ganymede, to see if it also contains sulfuric acid.
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