P086-08
New HST observations in the search for Europa’s plumes and a neutral torus

Wednesday, 16 December 2020: 17:58
Virtual
Lorenz Roth1, Kurt D Retherford2, Joachim Saur3, Darrell F Strobel4, Paul D Feldman4, Aljona Blöcker5, Tracy M Becker6, Nickolay Ivchenko1, Lucas Paganini7, Denis C Grodent8, Nathaniel Cunningham9 and H. T. Smith10, (1)KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Space and Plasma Physics, School of Electrical Engineering, Stockholm, Sweden, (2)Southwest Research Inst, San Antonio, TX, United States, (3)University of Cologne, Cologne, Germany, (4)Johns Hopkins Univ, Baltimore, MD, United States, (5)KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden, (6)Southwest Research Institute, San Antonio, TX, United States, (7)NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD, United States, (8)Université de Liège, LPAP - STAR Institute, Liege, Belgium, (9)Nebraska Wesleyan University, Lincoln, NE, United States, (10)Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, Laurel, MD, United States
Recorded Presentation
Abstract:
Europa’s potential subsurface habitat could possibly be investigated at locations of active outgassing, giving the question whether Europa has plumes a crucial importance. In the hunt for confirmation of Europa’s plumes, the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) has obtained spectral imaging observations of emissions from the atmosphere in a medium-sized HST campaign between March 2018 and August 2020. We will give the first overview of the results from the then completed campaign and discuss potential plume-related signals in the new data. In another HST campaign, high-sensitivity far-ultraviolet spectra of the western ansa of a potential Europa neutral torus will be obtained in August 2020. A torus at Europa’s distance to Jupiter was indirectly detected through measurements of energetic neutral atoms (ENAs). We present first results from the HST torus campaign, possibly providing independent evidence for a torus in Europa’s orbit.
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