The Planetary Society Blog
By Emily Lakdawalla
The Borup Fiord Pass expedition has departed
Jun. 22, 2006 | 11:47 PDT | 18:47 UTC
This is just a short note to say that the 4-person team of researchers who are off to study a possible Europa analog site on northern Ellesmere island left yesterday; the link goes to a news story I posted late yesterday, based on interviews with team leader Stephen Grasby and with Europa scientist Bob Pappalardo, who's sending a grad student.
When I first heard about the possibility of this expedition late last year from Bob via our esteemed executive director Lou Friedman, my first reaction was "ooh--can I go?" Lou and I have both been lucky enough to get to take a trip to the Haughton Mars research station on Devon Island (in different years), but we did have very different experiences. Lou arrived at the beginning of the field season and spent most of the time being so cold that he wanted nothing more than to shiver in his sleeping bag. I arrived at the height of the season and enjoyed great weather -- it was still cold, but nothing that layers of capilene, fleece, and Gore-Tex couldn't cope with (you can read my blogs from that trip here).
I hope the Ellesmere Island expedition gets good weather, and that Bob's student manages to gather the data she's looking for. Expeditions like this, along with lab experiments and continuing mining of the data from Galileo and Voyager are all helping to prepare the scientific community to get the most out of a future mission to Europa -- if we can only get such a mission started!
Comment Script
Comments
This comment form is powered by GentleSource Comment Script. It can be included in PHP or HTML files and allows visitors to leave comments on the website.
|
[ what is this? ]