Detecting Planetary Oceans: Application To The Uranus System
The discovery of Europa’s subsurface ocean has spawned a strong desire by the planetary community to return and assess the ocean’s habitability using the magnetic induction signal that Europa generates.
NASA has since formulated and developed the Europa Clipper mission with that same goal, anticipating its arrival in the Jovian system in the early 2030s. In parallel, ESA has developed the JUpiter Icy moons Explorer mission to further investigate the interior of Ganymede and other Jovian moons, scheduled to arrive approximately one year later.
As a result, extensive work has now been devoted to developing and refining methods to analyse magnetic induction measurements with the goal of characterizing oceans within icy moons, including those in the Neptune and Uranus systems, which are ideal laboratories for such investigations.
We present one such method, involving a distance-based inverse and forward modelling approach that leverages self-consistent interior models used to infer ocean and ice-shell properties of various moons that respond inductively to the dynamic magnetic environments in which they reside.
We demonstrate the method on a hypothetical ocean within Umbriel, showing the ocean thickness and conductivity constraints that can be inferred from a Monte Carlo error analysis using a three-flyby mission concept.
Block diagram of our distance-based model ocean detection and characterization approach, including a forward modelling chain, uncertainty quantification using Monte Carlo error analysis for synthetically generated observations and observation characterization. Using this data processing chain, two different methods can be employed to infer interior properties from measurements using self-consistent models produced by the forward modelling: (1) inversion for the amplitude and phase delay of the complex response function at multiple frequencies or (2) projection of the eigenvectors obtained from PCA on to an alternative basis for classification. — Philos Trans A Math Phys Eng Sci via PubMed
On detecting and characterizing planetary oceans in the solar system using a distance-based ensemble modelling approach: application to the Uranus system, Philos Trans A Math Phys Eng Sci via PubMed (open access)
Astrobiology
