Michael Lorrey wrote:
> Was just reading the latest on the Europa Orbiter mission planning, how
> people are concerned about contaminating Europa with earth microbes.
> What I want to know is: why can we expect Europa to not already be
> contaminated by earth microbes? Given impact events like the Yucatan
> Extinction, some biological material must have been ejected into orbit
> at some point in the past, and given that Europa has no atmosphere, any
> terran ejecta that landed on Europa in the past likely carried microbes
> fast frozen. Can anyone give any reason why this shouldn't be expected?
One *really* obvious and *really* important reason to be careful with Europa
is that, if Earth life does make it to Europa, that the divergence between
Europan and Earth life would give us a handle on how often and how
severe such events are.
Anyway, at present, the only reason to go to Europa is to study the life
there.*
It would be pretty goofy to run unnecessary risks of destroying/profoundly
altering the precise thing the mission is trying to study.
* If any, of course
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Mon May 28 2001 - 09:59:40 MDT