Victoria Jaggard
National Geographic News
November 16, 2009
In the oceans of a moon hundreds of millions of miles from the sun, something fishy may be alive—right now.

Below its icy crust Jupiter's moon Europa is believed to host a global ocean up to a hundred miles (160 kilometers) deep, with no land to speak of at the surface. (See "Jupiter Moon Has Violent, Hidden Oceans, Study Suggests.")

And the extraterrestrial ocean is currently being fed more than a hundred times more oxygen than previous models had suggested, according to provocative new research.

That amount of oxygen would be enough to support more than just microscopic life-forms: At least three million tons of fishlike creatures could theoretically live and breathe on Europa, said study author Richard Greenberg of the University of Arizona in Tucson.

(Related: "Did Rising Oxygen Levels Fuel Mammal Evolution?")

"There's nothing saying there is life there now," said Greenberg, who presented his work last month at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society's Division for Planetary Sciences. "But we do know there are the physical conditions to support it."

In fact, based on what we know about the Jovian moon, parts of Europa's seafloor should greatly resemble the environments around Earth's deep-ocean hydrothermal vents, said deep-sea molecular ecologist Timothy Shank.

"I'd be shocked if no life existed on Europa," said Shank, of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, who was not involved in the new study.

Video: Hydrothermal Vents on Earth

Link na http://news.nationalgeographic.com/n...ropa-fish.html
Lage iseng2 mampir Nat geo :maho
Gila Beneran tuh bakal ada nama na kehidupan selaen di bumi Malah bahkan di hanya sebuah Satelit planet??
tuh pernyataan na dia bukan na arti na org nama na shank itu yakin 80% yah ada kehidupan walau lom ada bukti??
Seru juga kalo beneran ada kehidupan disana...
Dan gw ga tau gw uda ketinggalan berita blom ini Ada artikel Nyatain bahwa dipastikan di bulan ada air na??

Water on the Moon Confirmed by NASA Crashes
Ker Than
for National Geographic News
Updated 2 p.m. ET, November 14, 2009
It's official: There's water on the moon—and a "significant amount" of it, too, members of NASA's recent moon-crash mission, LCROSS, announced Friday.

In October, NASA crashed a two-ton rocket and the SUV-size LCROSS (Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite) into the permanently shadowed crater Cabeus on the moon's south pole.

The crashes were part of an effort to kick up evidence of water on the moon (picture).

(Read more on the LCROSS mission's moon target.)

Despite disappointing many amateur astronomers on Earth, who had been expecting to see a giant plume of lunar dust and ice crystals, the moon-water mission was a success, NASA says. (See NASA 'Moon Bombing' a Hit, But LCROSS Impact Invisible?")

The LCROSS team took the known near-infrared light signature of water and compared it to the impact spectra LCROSS near-infrared recorded after the probe had sent its spent rocket crashing into the moon.

A spectrometer helps identify the composition of materials by examining which wavelengths of light they emit or absorb.

"We got good fits" for the data graphs, said Anthony Colaprete, LCROSS's principal investigator, at Friday's press conference at the NASA Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California.

"We could not put other compounds [in] and generate the same fit."

Water on the Moon: Video From the Day of Impact

Water on the Moon—Buckets of It

Additional evidence of water on the moon came from LCROSS's ultraviolet spectrometer, which detected energy signatures associated with hydroxyl, a byproduct of the breakup of water by sunlight.

The amount of moon water kicked up by the LCROSS crashes could fill about a dozen 2-gallon (7.6-liter) buckets, said Colaprete, adding that this is just a conservative estimate.

"Not Your Father's Moon," Water Discovery Suggests

The confirmation of water on the moon raises the possibility that humans may one day be able to extract drinking water or breathable oxygen as well as the raw ingredients for rocket fuel from moon rocks, Michael Wargo, chief lunar scientist for Exploration Systems at NASA headquarters in Washington, D.C., said at the conference.

(Read more about moon exploration.)

Samples of water on the moon might also help shed light on the early history and evolution of the solar system, said physicist Greg Delory, a senior fellow at the Space Sciences Laboratory and Center for Integrative Planetary Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley.

"This is not your father's moon," Delory said at the conference.

"Rather than a dead and unchanging world, it could be a very dynamic and interesting one."

Link na http://news.nationalgeographic.com/n...-the-moon.html
Duh rada mabok baca teori bagaimana bisa ada air na di bulan
ada bisa terjemahin ga??