{"id":799073,"date":"2026-05-15T21:30:16","date_gmt":"2026-05-15T21:30:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/799073\/"},"modified":"2026-05-15T21:30:16","modified_gmt":"2026-05-15T21:30:16","slug":"missions-to-ocean-moons-face-a-strange-hazard-scientists-didnt-expect","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/799073\/","title":{"rendered":"Missions to Ocean Moons Face a Strange Hazard Scientists Didn\u2019t Expect"},"content":{"rendered":"

Of the hundreds of confirmed moons orbiting Jupiter and Saturn, NASA describes Europa and Enceladus as \u201cpromising<\/a>\u201d and \u201ccompelling<\/a>.\u201d Researchers suspect<\/a> that these icy moons have liquid water oceans beneath their frozen surface, making them top research targets<\/a> for big stakeholders like ESA or NASA. But a new study identifies a strange hazard for ocean-moon-bound missions: \u201cfluffy\u201d ice.<\/p>\n

If, as researchers predict, cryovolcanic eruptions contribute to the formation of the moons\u2019 icy shells, the extremely low pressures would generate a layered, highly porous ice with a texture reminiscent of, well, a croissant. In a recent Earth and Planetary Science Letters<\/a> paper, the team describes a vacuum chamber experiment that simulated the low-gravity environment of Jupiter\u2019s Europa and Saturn\u2019s Enceladus. According to the tests, on (mock) Europa, water freezes into brittle sheets around 7.8 inches (20 centimeters), whereas on (mock) Enceladus these sheets can grow up to 787 feet (20 meters) thick.<\/p>\n

These conditions are potentially hazardous for future landers to moons like Europa. I mean, imagine an expensive lander, after years of flying over to Europa, proceeding to burst through the brittle ice and sink into the freezing depths. Not ideal! In that sense, the findings highlight important considerations for upcoming missions to outer space moons.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe low-pressure freezing of water is strongly affected by the escaping vapor,\u201d Vojt\u011bch Pato\u010dka<\/a>, the study\u2019s first author and a geophysicist at Charles University in the Czech Republic, told Gizmodo. \u201cThe highly porous and fragile layers that we observe could be several meters thick on the small icy worlds, which is enough to endanger a landed mission.\u201d<\/p>\n

Elusive icy worlds <\/p>\n

Humanity got its first real peek at Europa<\/a> in 1979, during Voyager 1\u2019s flyby of Jupiter. Its successor, Voyager 2, captured a higher-resolution<\/a> view of Enceladus in 1981. Although the two moons were discovered much earlier, a clearer look at the moons\u2019 icy surfaces got scientists fairly excited about the prospects of finding water, and, therefore, some sign of habitability beyond Earth.<\/p>\n

\"EnceladusA mosaic of Enceladus, created with images captured by Cassini in 2008. Credit: NASA\/JPL\/Space Science Institute <\/p>\n

Subsequent expeditions by missions like Galileo<\/a> (named for the guy who found the thing) or Cassini-Huygens<\/a> sent back fascinating observations about the distant moons. As a result, researchers confirmed active cryovolcanism\u2014eruptions of gases and other volatile materials that quickly freeze after reaching the surface\u2014on Enceladus and suspect the same for Europa, according to the U.S. Geological Survey<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Of course, researchers know that water isn\u2019t necessarily the smoking gun for alien life. Even so, the unique composition of icy moon surfaces offers key insights into astrobiological and chemical dynamics unknown to those on Earth.<\/p>\n

An icy pastry <\/p>\n

Given scientific interest, the latest study \u201cseems like the kind of thing that would have been done already,\u201d Pato\u010dka admitted to Science<\/a>. Since nobody had, Pato\u010dka and colleagues ran a large-scale vacuum chamber experiment in \u201cGeorge<\/a>,\u201d a big simulation chamber at the Open University in the U.K., used to simulate Martian conditions. For the experiment, the team prepared 88 pounds (49 kilograms) of low-salinity water in a fish tank, dropping the temperature and pressure to reproduce the conditions of outer solar system moons.<\/p>\n

\"FluffyImages taken at each stage of the freezing process. \u00a9 Pato\u010dka et al., 2026 <\/p>\n

The researchers identified three distinct stages of freezing. First, the lack of pressure makes the water boil, as layers of crusty ice accumulate while escaping vapors push the layers upward. Then, the vapor pockets freeze too, until eventually a lower layer of more transparent ice with fewer bubbles forms at the bottom. The cross section of the resulting structure (labeled \u201ce\u201d in the photo above) indeed resembles that of a puffy croissant\u2014hence, \u201cfluffy ice.\u201d<\/p>\n

Looking ahead <\/p>\n

Meanwhile, global institutions continue to send over spacecraft to the solar system\u2019s far side to study these systems. ESA\u2019s JUICE<\/a> is on its way and will reach Jupiter in 2031, whereas NASA\u2019s Europa Clipper<\/a> will get there by 2030. But these are just the ongoing missions, and both NASA and ESA (in collaboration with others like JAXA<\/a>) are actively planning their successors.<\/p>\n

\"EuropaA SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket carrying NASA\u2019s Europa Clipper left for space on Monday, Oct. 14, 2024. Credit: SpaceX\/NASA <\/p>\n

So the latest findings are a good thing to be aware of. Ingrid Daubar, a planetary scientist on NASA\u2019s Europa Clipper orbiter mission who wasn\u2019t involved in the new work, told Science that this type of porous, fragile ice would \u201cdefinitely pose some serious engineering issues,\u201d and researchers would have to \u201cre-envision the types of landing mechanisms we thought might work on Europa.\u201d<\/p>\n

The paper also alluded to this challenge; the cryovolcanic features on Europa and similar bodies won\u2019t be ideal to \u201csupport a safe and stable landing due to the highly porous nature of phyllo and cellular ice structures reaching several to tens of meters deep, with smaller gravity implying greater depths.\u201d If we want to plan landers to, well, land, engineers will have to take the local terrain into consideration.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, Pato\u010dka\u2019s team plans to probe this phenomenon further. Pato\u010dka told Gizmodo that the plan is to return to George next week. This time, the team will see how this distinct freezing process works with flowing water so that the experiment is more true to the \u201cconditions of cryovolcanic effusive flows,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Of the hundreds of confirmed moons orbiting Jupiter and Saturn, NASA describes Europa and Enceladus as \u201cpromising\u201d and…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":799074,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24],"tags":[151253,71239,159,161,783,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-799073","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-space","8":"tag-enceladus","9":"tag-europa","10":"tag-science","11":"tag-solar-system","12":"tag-space","13":"tag-united-states","14":"tag-unitedstates","15":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/116580728696660011","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/799073","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=799073"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/799073\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/799074"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=799073"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=799073"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=799073"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}