
Scientists Confirm Water Vapor on Europa - l1n
http://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2019/nasa-scientists-confirm-water-vapor-on-europa
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eutropia
> Our global survey at infrared wavelengths resulted in non-detections on 16
> out of 17 dates

Good thing they got lucky within their allotted time! It's a shame we don't
have more observatories like Mauna Kea.

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jedberg
I miss the days when NASA's budget was a whole number percentage of GDP...

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merpnderp
They spent 30 years wasting the vast majority on ridiculous things like the
Space Shuttle. Multiple billions of dollars to launch what Elon Musk will be
launching for a measly 2 million.

Their science was always a rounding error on their pork.

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jvanderbot
Ridiculous. Hindsight applied to NASA missions is the worst kind of selective
thinking. The mandate was always zero tolerance for failure, first-of-its-kind
missions not driven by reprodiceability or commercialization.

By definition, NASA moves away from what can be given to commercial partners.
SpaceX is 50 years behind the curve for getting to Mars, so yeah, it's going
to be cheaper. And you better believe SpaceX is hiring from a knowledge base
built by government funding be it NASA or DoD.

Its absolutely no coincidence that funds are distributed across the country
and businesses are employed where possible aka pork. To get congress behind a
massive public scientific venture that's never been done... that's what you
have to do nowadays. Dont blame the engineers (NASA) for bad management
(congress).

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merpnderp
It’s not hindsight, it was always clear to anyone not drinking the Space
Shuttle kookaid. The Saturn V was a superior launch vehicle from day one. And
if we’d have stuck with it we could have had billions in more science projects
and likely ended up with drastically cheaper launches as it was improved. Hell
maybe NASA would have seen if it could land one on its engines.

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rptr_87
Wasn't this predicted from the times of Carl Sagan. I remember seeing an
episode in Cosmos which predicted water vapors evaporating from ice cracks.

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sp332
Everyone thought water would be more abundant in the solar system than it
really is.

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yellowapple
It's still pretty dang abundant, though, is it not? Ceres is literally a giant
ball of water ice. So is Pluto for the most part (it's even hypothesized to
have liquid water under its icy crust). So are most asteroids and comets and
dwarf planet(oid)s and gas giant moons. There's massive amounts of it in both
Uranus and Neptune.

Like sure, it ain't like 19th century fiction books where space is literally
an ocean and the latter part of the word "astronaut" is far more literal than
it is now, but water is by no means scarce in the solar system or in the
universe as a whole as far as anyone can tell.

If anything, everyone thought water would be _less_ abundant in the solar
system than it really is.

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kilo_bravo_3
I highly recommend we attempt no landing there.

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teddyh
Context: Parent is paraphrasing a well-known quote from
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010:_The_Year_We_Make_Contact](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010:_The_Year_We_Make_Contact)

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touchpadder
year 2150, Scientists Confirm Traces of Water in Europe

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swasheck
I appreciate the subtle environmental commentary

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blattimwind
Soon...
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Europa_Report](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Europa_Report)
(the film is quite good)

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saagarjha
Really great movie, especially considering its tiny budget. It’s pretty hard
too if you’re into that sort of thing.

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pvaldes
on Jupiter's Moon Europa would be a better title.

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wavefunction
What Europa would be confused for the moon Europa?

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pvaldes
Europa the old world's continent, as is known by 600 millions of spanish
speaking people in the planet (obviously)

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brnt
Not just Spanish, just about every other European language except English.

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brmgb
And French. Also, it's εὐρώπη in Greek so Europe is the logical
transliteration.

I find it weird that the moon is called Europa in English however. French uses
Europe for both.

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empthought
The moon is named for the mythological consort of Jupiter, which has always
been "Europa" in English.

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brmgb
> The moon is named for the mythological consort of Jupiter

The continent too yet their spellings differ. That is the weird part.

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SubiculumCode
Given water vapor was observed, can those signatures be examined for organic
compounds?

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Uhuhreally
there will definitely be bacteria living there

