Scientists Confirm Water Vapor on Europa | Hacker News Reader

Scientists Confirm Water Vapor on Europa

nasa.gov

160 pointsl1n46 comments

> Our global survey at infrared wavelengths resulted in non-detections on 16 out of 17 dates

Good thing they got lucky within their allotted time! It's a shame we don't have more observatories like Mauna Kea.

I miss the days when NASA's budget was a whole number percentage of GDP...

They spent 30 years wasting the vast majority on ridiculous things like the Space Shuttle. Multiple billions of dollars to launch what Elon Musk will be launching for a measly 2 million.

Their science was always a rounding error on their pork.

Ridiculous. Hindsight applied to NASA missions is the worst kind of selective thinking. The mandate was always zero tolerance for failure, first-of-its-kind missions not driven by reprodiceability or commercialization.

By definition, NASA moves away from what can be given to commercial partners. SpaceX is 50 years behind the curve for getting to Mars, so yeah, it's going to be cheaper. And you better believe SpaceX is hiring from a knowledge base built by government funding be it NASA or DoD.

Its absolutely no coincidence that funds are distributed across the country and businesses are employed where possible aka pork. To get congress behind a massive public scientific venture that's never been done... that's what you have to do nowadays. Dont blame the engineers (NASA) for bad management (congress).

It’s not hindsight, it was always clear to anyone not drinking the Space Shuttle kookaid. The Saturn V was a superior launch vehicle from day one. And if we’d have stuck with it we could have had billions in more science projects and likely ended up with drastically cheaper launches as it was improved. Hell maybe NASA would have seen if it could land one on its engines.

The science that came out of the Space Shuttle program was enormous[0].

Also, many of the people that work at SpaceX used to work on the Space Shuttle program. That's where they learned all their skills, and it's why they can launch with only $2M each.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_spinoff_technologies

Yeah, but the argument isn't that NASA should have stopped developing space tech. It's just the shuttle was an extremely expensive product that could have been designed better.

Maybe that's something we could have figured out before it started, but maybe we had to go down the path to know that it was a bad path to go down.

Lots of people made this case very strongly before the shuttle was finished. But NASA quickly became a political instrument to spread around pork, wasting decades of potential science projects because of gutless administrators and corrupt politicians. There is no reasonable defense of the Space Shuttle program.

Correct me if I'm wrong but didn't SpaceX benefit from the knowledge gained from (the failures of) NASA projects?

Knowledge doesn't start from scratch each time one starts a new project. I find it hard to argue that that money was a waste. It's a slippery slope to claiming that science shouldn't be funded, which we know is wrong; knowledge needs a space where it can fail without repercussions, this is how most modern technologies were invented [1].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8jTCBirELDU

Your comment can tell us a lot how technological progress works.

For instance, Mark Zuckerberg worked a couple of months to code Facebook on PHP, and be cheered as a computer wizard all over the world..

But we often forget the decades of work on Browsers/Web/Web 2.0, PHP, MySQL, OS's, internet protocols, etc.. not even taking into account the try-and-fail technologies (like SOUP et al.)

I think this is very unfair, because its like a bunch of people have worked hard pilling sheets of paper and when somebody put the last sheet of paper, somehow we forget about the guys who really make that tower and only the guy who put the top cherry, with the least effort is called a genius.

We get it that the world might see it like this, but here in HN we should understand that the real hard working geniuses are probably not getting the fame they deserve (with the exception of the likes like Linus Torvalds)

But guys like Zuckerberg, Jobs and Musk are definitely overated while Dennis Ritchie, Jeff Bonwick, Bill Joy, Rasmus Lerdorf, John von Neumann, Niklaus Wirth, etc.. are the people who we should really be thankful for, not just the guy who combine hard work to make something great and make billions of dollars out of it.

(dãhh.. sorry for 'SOUP' instead of SOAP)

Microsoft spent 30 YEARS WASTING their money on RIDICULOUS things like WINDOWS 2000, something that I could launch in a measly 2 hours using Linux

Tangent: am I alone in thinking Windows 2000 was the last good version of Windows? I feel like it had most (if not all) of the Windows features that were/are actually important, but with none of the bloat.

"will be launching"

Interestingly, Musk was supposed to launch manned vehicles into space years ago, but he's not been able to because... they keep exploding. And he's spent billions of dollars to get to that point, not 2 million.

I'm of the mind that the Space Shuttle was a misallocation of resources, but hindsight is 20/20, and there's no particular reason to think that, given the technology and constraints present at the time, anyone could have done much better than the engineers at NASA.

People forget it came about in an era of trying to out-spend the Soviet Union's military to make it collapse. The shuttle was built the way it was with the expectation of military launches. When those didn't materialize in sufficient quantity, they were left with an expensive ship that didn't serve any of the remaining uses well.

That's... not how it works.

Wasn't this predicted from the times of Carl Sagan. I remember seeing an episode in Cosmos which predicted water vapors evaporating from ice cracks.

Everyone thought water would be more abundant in the solar system than it really is.

It's still pretty dang abundant, though, is it not? Ceres is literally a giant ball of water ice. So is Pluto for the most part (it's even hypothesized to have liquid water under its icy crust). So are most asteroids and comets and dwarf planet(oid)s and gas giant moons. There's massive amounts of it in both Uranus and Neptune.

Like sure, it ain't like 19th century fiction books where space is literally an ocean and the latter part of the word "astronaut" is far more literal than it is now, but water is by no means scarce in the solar system or in the universe as a whole as far as anyone can tell.

If anything, everyone thought water would be less abundant in the solar system than it really is.

I highly recommend we attempt no landing there.

Context: Parent is paraphrasing a well-known quote from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010:_The_Year_We_Make_Contact

Did you ever read the third book, 2063? They land on Europa and we get to learn why that was a bad idea.

year 2150, Scientists Confirm Traces of Water in Europe

I appreciate the subtle environmental commentary

Soon... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Europa_Report (the film is quite good)

Really great movie, especially considering its tiny budget. It’s pretty hard too if you’re into that sort of thing.

on Jupiter's Moon Europa would be a better title.

What Europa would be confused for the moon Europa?

I would be less worried about people confusing it with some other Europa and more that people simply don't know what it is. Adding "Jupiter's moon Europa" would still mean the same for you and me who know that Jupiter has a moon named Europe. But for someone who doesn't know, the difference means they understand the context better.

Europa the old world's continent, as is known by 600 millions of spanish speaking people in the planet (obviously)

Not just Spanish, just about every other European language except English.

And French. Also, it's εὐρώπη in Greek so Europe is the logical transliteration.

I find it weird that the moon is called Europa in English however. French uses Europe for both.

The moon is named for the mythological consort of Jupiter, which has always been "Europa" in English.

> The moon is named for the mythological consort of Jupiter

The continent too yet their spellings differ. That is the weird part.

On an English-language forum, the context is pretty obvious.

Coming from Belgium and speaking English a lot.

Obviously, no

In the English language, Europe is the name of the continent, and Europa is the name of the moon orbiting Jupiter - in fact, its the first google response that comes up on English-language versions of it.

Lol, translate Europe from English to Dutch ( my mother tongue)

I have an edge case for 15 million people in Europe ;)

I think most people already know that Earth has water vapour :P

After the last month of non-stop pouring rains in Europa?, no water vapour at sight. All is cold impacts targetting the nape.

I guess I wouldn't expect to read an article about scientists discovering water vapor in Europe. Water vapor on Europa however is momentous and I can only wonder if we might be closer to finding extraterrestrial life somewhere in our solar system.

I read it as europe. My first thought was "and this is somehow bad for climate or what ?" and went to read the article.

Still, the headline would be correct. They are water vapors in your Europe too

Given water vapor was observed, can those signatures be examined for organic compounds?

there will definitely be bacteria living there

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