Re: exo-bacteria, panspermia, etc.

From: jeff davis (jrd1415@yahoo.com)
Date: Thu Dec 06 2001 - 18:22:07 MST


--- CurtAdams@aol.com wrote:
> I've seen calculations indicating a fair amount of
> viable spores would have
> been exchanged between Earth and Mars over the past
> 4 billion years. Is
> there similar stuff for Europa? It occurs to me
> that frozen bits of Europa
> might be particularly good at transfering life,
> although I don't know how
> hard it would be to get it out of that gravity well.

Plenty of info on the net about the cosmos. At

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/galileo/moons/europa.html

a nasa site about Europa, we find that the escape
velocity is 2.02 km/sec.

And I think it was Freeman Dyson who suggested that,
rather than landing a mission on Europa and tunnelling
through the ice crust to sample the possible oceans
below, that it would be much easier to find out about
life on Europa by sending a probe to sample the rings
of Jupiter. The theory here is that, just as Martian
material reaches Earth as ejecta from large impacts,
so too should ejecta from Europa end up in orbit
around Jupiter.

Best, Jeff Davis

 "Everything's hard till you know how to do it."
                       Ray Charles

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