An nameless reader shares a report: In current a long time, NASA has despatched massive spacecraft — Galileo and Cassini, respectively — to fly round Jupiter and Venus to discover the handfuls of moons that exist in these planetary techniques. The spacecraft investigated all method of intriguing moons, from little radiation-saturated hellholes to a world lined in volcanoes. However essentially the most persistently attention-grabbing discovery made by these probes was that Jupiter and Venus are surrounded by small and huge moons lined in ice, possessing massive water oceans under, or each. This was thrilling as a result of the place there’s water in its liquid state, there’s the potential for life.
In response to those discoveries, NASA is planning to launch a mission to Europa, an ice-encrusted moon within the Jovian system, as early as 2024. One other mission could launch to Saturn’s moon Titan a couple of years later, the place there are oceans of liquid methane on the floor. And simply final month, the European Area Company launched a spacecraft, Juice, to discover a number of icy moons at Jupiter. Now, NASA may have so as to add the moons of Uranus to its exploration hit checklist. Moreover being recognized for its humorous identify and its sensible cyan shade, Uranus has no less than 27 moons. And so they’re fairly intriguing, too. The house company has solely ever flown one spacecraft, Voyager 2, by the seventh planet in our Photo voltaic System. The Voyager spacecraft flew by Uranus a very long time in the past, in 1985. However in gentle of the discoveries made by the Cassini, Daybreak, and New Horizons spacecraft, scientists have been revisiting the info collected by Voyager along with the info obtained by ground-based telescopes. This has led NASA scientists to conclude that 4 of Uranus’ largest moons — Ariel, Umbriel, Titania, and Oberon — in all probability comprise water oceans under their icy crusts. These oceans are doubtless dozens of kilometers deep and possibly pretty salty in being sandwiched between the higher ice and inside rock core.
