Trinity alumnus and Dublin native Prof Lauren Mc Keown is leading this project.
‘Damhán Alla’ – the Irish for spider or wall demon – is the name given to the spider-like feature on Jupiter’s icy moon Europa by a team of researchers led by an Irish planetary scientist.
Researchers, led by University of Central Florida (UCF) physics professor Lauren Mc Keown – a Trinity College Dublin (TCD) alumnus – and including Dr Jennifer Scully, another TCD alumnus, are hoping to understand how Europa’s icy features formed.
They think the findings could have implications for future missions that might land on Jupiter’s moon, or other icy, airless worlds.
The team also includes scientists from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL), Brown University and the Planetary Science Institute. They published their findings in The Planetary Science Journal earlier this month.
The study explores whether the spider-like feature in Europa’s Mannann’an crater was formed in a similar manner to Earth’s lake stars.
Lake stars form branching patterns when snow falls on frozen lakes and holes form in the ice. This allows water to flow through the snow, melting it and spreading in a way that is energetically favourable. These kinds of patterns are commonly found in nature.
The team of researchers believe that the spider-like feature – Damhán Alla – may have formed after impact, when liquid brine within the icy shell extruded through broken-up ice to form a pattern similar to Earth’s lake stars.
The feature was first observed by NASA’s Galileo spacecraft in 1998 and this remains the only sources of images of Europa’s icy features.
However, more information is expected with higher resolution imagery from the Europa Clipper mission, a NASA spacecraft scheduled to arrive at the Jupiter system in April 2030.
“The significance of our research is really exciting,” Mc Keown said. “Surface features like these can tell us a lot about what’s happening beneath the ice. If we see more of them with Europa Clipper, they could point to local brine pools below the surface.”
Damhán Alla
Mc Keown’s interest in space began as a teenager when she first learned about the Cassini spacecraft, which explored Enceladus, one of Saturn’s small icy moons.
“I was fascinated by animations in an RTE News story showing a water plume shooting miles above the moon’s surface and the possibility that liquid water, or even an ocean, might exist there,” the Dublin native said.
Dr Lauren Mc Keown
This interest eventually led her to a career in planetary science at TCD, an internship at NASA and a postdoctoral project at NASA’s JPL.
“There are only a handful of Irish planetary scientists,” she said. And so she was happy to connect with Scully for the project.
“Because Jen and I are Irish, and because many landforms on Europa already have Irish and Celtic names – including the crater in which the feature is located, which refers to the Irish mythology ‘Son of the Sea’ – we decided to call it the Irish word for spider, Damhán Alla,” Mc Keown explained.
Looking ahead, Mc Keown plans to investigate how low pressure affects the formation of these features and whether they could form beneath an icy crust, similar to how lava flows on Earth beneath an almost solid overlying crust.
She is also setting up a new lab at UCF where she is designing a low-pressure chamber specifically for these experiments. Working with students, she will create icy simulants while continuing to collaborate with teams at JPL.
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