Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
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 ...
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 following month, Voyager 1 was launched from the same location. In March 1979, Voyager 1 approached Jupiter and followed 4 months later with Voyager 2's flyby. In November 1980, Voyager 1 approached Saturn, taking a gravity assist to visit Titan and leave the solar system headed north out of the ecliptic plane.
Ahead of the spacecraft is a 1.8 billion-mile journey to Europa on a trajectory taking it past Mars and then Earth, using the planets’ gravity as a slingshot to add speed for the trek.
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.
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]
The perijove reduction campaign began; it involved incremental changes in the closest approach to Jupiter carried out over four Callisto encounters (C20–C23). The campaign was designed to set up flybys of Io, the Galilean moon closest to Jupiter. C21 1,047 (650) 30 June 1999 NIMS studied the trailing edge of Callisto.
In the asteroid belt within 3.5 AU from the Sun, the major mean-motion resonances with Jupiter are locations of gaps in the asteroid distribution, the Kirkwood gaps (most notably at the 4:1, 3:1, 5:2, 7:3 and 2:1 resonances). Asteroids have been ejected from these almost empty lanes by repeated perturbations. However, there are still ...