Europa is a curious moon with many ‘what ifs’ and not many concrete answers as to its processes and internal structure. Its outer layer is a large ice shell with a body of water underneath and a solid rock center. It is a tad smaller in size than our own moon at 3,000 km (1,900 miles) in diameter. My research is focused on Europa, the sixth closest moon to Jupiter. It displays non-ice material that formed from geological activity (dashed circle) and the red arrows point to ridges and fractures in the ice shell (Cox et al., 2008). Image on the left shows an area of Europa called Conamara Chaos. One of the most prominent thoughts I remember having was my research is a puzzle to solve and once I started filling in those words everything started to fall into place.įigure 1 (above) are images of Europa’s surface taken by NASA’s Galileo spacecraft in 19 (NASA/JPL/DLR). All I knew is that I loved geology and I loved space, so I decided I’d throw myself into it and see where I ended up. I had no experience with anything planetary or even how to start learning about it. Jon Kay, was not a slow walk into the shallow end of the pool, but more like a head first dive into the ocean. My journey into planetary research, under the guidance of Dr. Unlike many other forms of puzzles, crosswords provide small clues and once you fill in one word it helps solve the others until eventually the entire puzzle is complete. So, what is geology without rocks? It’s a crossword puzzle. However, in the case of planetary geology a lot of times (not all), rock samples are not part of the science. The first thing someone usually thinks of when geology is mentioned is rocks. There is an interesting grey area when dealing with planetary geology.
0 kommentar(er)
