Splooge!
Oh come on. Who wasn't thinking this?!
Space scientists have just figured out that an unusual anomaly from over 20 years ago was the equivalent of a space probe being squirted in the face. Back in 1997 the Galileo Jupiter probe skimmed the watery moon of Europa and now it appears it got a faceful from a water plume 1,000km (621 miles) wide. Flying at 6km (3.7 …
Speed: 650 Double Deckers/Second (0.2% of the maximum velocity of a sheep in a vacuum.)
Altitude: 9100 Brontosauruses
Converting from Metric & Imperial units gave slightly different results so I used a round number somewhere between both values.
https://www.theregister.co.uk/Design/page/reg-standards-converter.html
They think the ocean might be 20-30 miles deep, so it would have as much water as the Earth's oceans. Before life crawled up onto land, it had become complex - and BIG in some cases. Even if you look at the life that has evolved around the vents at depth where there's no sunlight, there is complex life there. Maybe not blue whale sized, but we certainly don't need a microscope to see it.
I see no reason Europa should stop its evolution at single cell.
The ice at the bottom might be a problem. The ten plus miles of it. Or, water is destructive to complex organic molecules, especially if it has sulphates in it. Did I mention the steady leakage of hydrogen peroxide from the irradiated ice ? Lets not go into the energy available to build large non-bacterial organisms. So probably only a weak sulphurous acid solution with traces of salts lurking under the ice. However just doing the chemistry investigations would be great research.
ARE YOU KIDDING ME?!??!?! It was missed and not limited by the 1997 Pentium which (without the Pentium of Borg bug [I AM PENTIUM OF BORG, DIVISION IS IMPOSSIBLE, YOU WILL BE APPROXIMATED]) is more than capable of calculating pretty much anything, given a month or multiple.
200Km up and flying through it.
Europa gets more interesting with every new observation being crunched through.
Once again proving that properly archiving all that historic data (which is not that big a chunk of storage in the whole scheme of things) is a pretty worthwhile investment.
"I'll just get the Saturn Five plans..."
"Oh, wait..."
...You don't have a microfilm reader? ;) Contrary to John Lewis's claim in "Mining the Sky" that the blueprints are gone, NASA preserved the blueprints for the Saturn V at the Marshall Space Center in microfiche format. Documents for ground support equipment are also preserved.
Made of some sort of lightweight flexible material.. maybe stretchable and contained in a hermetically sealed enclosure of some sort? Silicone for the capture device and foil for its wrapping?
Seems a sensible way to collected ejected matter to me.....
I'll get my coat, no need to push...
I always find it entertaining whenever mass simply gaining a particular altitude from a planetary surface gets confused with mass at the same altitude also possessing orbital velocity. The difference is more than superficial, for purposes of harvesting said mass for later use (not to mention colliding with). If one could merely impart acceleration upon it as a way of "pushing off it" so to speak - well, good luck with that, but you can only do that as long as you are flying through said plume...
life, albeit on a microbial scale
Aw, I wanted it to be those creatures on the front of progressive rock album covers.