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Europa's gravity is approximately 13% of Earth's. The temperature on Europa varies from −160 °C at the equator, to −220 °C at either of its poles. [145] Europa's subsurface ocean is thought to be significantly [clarification needed] warmer however. It is hypothesized that because of radioactive and tidal heating (as mentioned in the ...
Vesta (radius 262.7 ± 0.1 km), the second-largest asteroid, appears to have a differentiated interior and therefore likely was once a dwarf planet, but it is no longer very round today. [74] Pallas (radius 255.5 ± 2 km ), the third-largest asteroid, appears never to have completed differentiation and likewise has an irregular shape.
Europa Clipper is designed to follow up on evidence for a subsurface ocean underneath Europa's ice crust, found using the Galileo spacecraft which orbited Jupiter from 1995 to 2003. Plans to send a spacecraft to Europa were initially conceived with projects such as Europa Orbiter and Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter , in which a spacecraft would be ...
The images and spectra of Europa, published in the Planetary Science Journal, reveal that Europa’s crust is mainly composed of frozen water ice with non-ice materials contaminating the surface.
[1] Three model versions have been published: EGM84 with n=m=180, EGM96 with n=m=360, and EGM2008 with n=m=2160. n and m are the degree and orders of harmonic coefficients; the higher they are, the more parameters the models have, and the more precise they are. EGM2008 also contains expansions to n=2190. [1]
The goal of the mission is to determine the thickness of Europa's icy shell and how it interacts with the ocean below. (Scripps News) NASA’s Europa Clipper launches from Kennedy Space Center [Video]
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It showed no sign of quitting at the end of the primary mission, so it was given a highly focused set of new exploration objectives, defined in part by the findings of the primary mission. As some of these new objectives centered on investigating Europa in great detail, the new mission was appropriately called the "Galileo Europa Mission" (GEM ...