I read that in last week's Nature, Paul Schenk of the Lunar Planetary
Institute estimates Europa's crust to be at least 12 miles deep. He calculated
this on impact crater shapes.
If 12 miles is the minimum depth of the ocean, would this pose a serious
engineering challenge for a submersible?
I'm confused. Does the 12 miles refer to ice thickness, ice and water,
water, or what?
Best regards,
Jack
-Original Message-
From: Thomas Green [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Thursday 30 May 2002 09:45
To:
sorry for the confusion. 12 miles is the ice thickness of the crust.
I should've asked, "If 12 miles is the minimum depth to reach
the ocean, would this pose a serious engineering challenge for a submersible?"
"Reeve, Jack W." wrote:
I'm confused. Does the 12 miles refer to ice
thickness, ice
I read that in last week's Nature, Paul Schenk of the Lunar Planetary
Institute estimates Europa's crust to be at least 12 miles deep. He
calculated
this on impact crater shapes.
If 12 miles is the minimum depth of the ocean, would this pose a serious
engineering challenge for a submersible?
Is that assuming 12 miles of water? Does it change things if you're under 12
miles of ice, whose density is less than 1 g/cc ?
I'm not smart enough to figure that out...
-Original Message-
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of Reeve,
Jack W.
Sent: Thursday, May
It seems like pressure is just one problem to solve. Some other questions I'm
thinking about:
1. How long would it take to melt through 12 miles of ice?
2. Is communication much more difficult?
3. Are there layers of ice flowing at different speeds that might make for a
shear-zone or
As to question 1-
In our recently completed senior design project (head to
expert.cc.purdue.edu/~precoda if you're interested), we in Purdue's
Astronautical Engineering program found a melting time of about 9 months
for 2 1/2 miles of ice, assuming all 4.3 kW of a typical RTG's thermal
output
