In message , Pat Flannery
writes


Jonathan Silverlight wrote:


This should really be in sci..space.tech or sci.astro, but doesn't
some of the evidence for a fairly thin ice layer on Europa come from
the fact that it's all broken up, as though the individual icebergs
move relative to each other? There's a _lot_ of tidal strain keeping
things moving.

I don't think NASA spotted any movement during Galileo's mission, as
that would have been big news, and clinched the case for the water
layer...and there are _some_ meteor craters on the moon, so the surface
isn't getting remade on anything like a yearly basis.
Pat

Maybe, but you'd only need movement of a few feet (inches ?) to snap
the cable. Europa's tides are apparently 500 meters high.

http://uanews.opi.arizona.edu/cgi-bi...a/wa/SRStoryDe
tails?ArticleID=4950

I would love to see the Europa deep probe, and I hope it will occur
sometime this century unless they contaminate Lake Vostok & put the
whole idea on ice, but I think it will be a huge undertaking and
probably use an autonomous drill, with no direct link to the surface.
--
"Forty millions of miles it was from us, more than forty millions of miles of
void"
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