Where are the ocean worlds in our solar system -
Ocean worlds are planets, moons and rocky bodies in our solar system where there are large amounts of water.
It’s impossible to know exactly how many there may be, but the current information at our disposal presents a map — or at least scattered parts of one — to the watery worlds of our cosmic neighborhood.Galileo captured this view of Europa on its 14th orbit of Jupiter on March 29, 1998. The image is a mosaic of five different pointings. The filters used for this image cover a broader range of the spectrum than human eyes can see.
“On Europa, the ice is about 110 kelvins on the surface,” said Mohamed Nassif, an aerospace engineering Ph.D. student at Georgia Institute of Technology who has worked on a Europa lander concept. “The hardness of the ice is comparable to a diamond.”A table showing key information about the probable ocean worlds of the solar system.Not only is Europa’s icy exterior extremely tough but it’s also unclear how deep it really is, making the ocean beneath it even more elusive.
While a handful of spacecraft have visited the Saturn system, it was NASA’s Cassini mission that gave us the most unprecedented detail of Enceladus’ ocean. Between 2008 and 2015, the spacecraft swept through the moon’s plumes, directly sampling its ocean spray. While it didn’t detect life, Cassini’s discoveries have elucidated Enceladus’ ocean, making it an even more tantalizing destination for future study.
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