Print Email Facebook Twitter On the in-situ detectability of Europa's water vapour plumes from a flyby mission Title On the in-situ detectability of Europa's water vapour plumes from a flyby mission Author Huybrighs, Hans L F (Instiutet for rymdfysik; Max-Planck-Institut fur Sonnensystemforschung; Technische Universität Braunschweig) Futaana, Yoshifumi (Instiutet for rymdfysik) Barabash, Stanislav (Instiutet for rymdfysik) Wieser, Martin (Instiutet for rymdfysik) Wurz, Peter (University of Bern) Krupp, Norbert (Max-Planck-Institut fur Sonnensystemforschung) Glassmeier, Karl Heinz (Technical University of Braunschweig; Max-Planck-Institut fur Sonnensystemforschung) Vermeersen, L.L.A. (TU Delft Physical and Space Geodesy; TU Delft Astrodynamics & Space Missions) Date 2016 Abstract We investigate the feasibility of detecting water molecules (H2O) and water ions (H2O+) from the Europa plumes from a flyby mission. A Monte Carlo particle tracing method is used to simulate the trajectories of neutral particles under the influence of Europa's gravity field and ionized particles under the influence of Jupiter's magnetic field and the convectional electric field. As an example mission case we investigate the detection of neutral and ionized molecules using the Particle Environment Package (PEP), which is part of the scientific payload of the future JUpiter ICy moon Explorer mission (JUICE). We consider plumes that have a mass flux that is three orders of magnitude lower than what has been inferred from recent Hubble observations (Roth et al., 2014a). We demonstrate that the in-situ detection of H2O and H2O+ from these low mass flux plumes is possible by the instruments with large margins with respect to background and instrument noise. The signal to noise ratio for neutrals is up to ∼5700 and ∼33 for ions. We also show that the geometry of the plume source, either a point source or 1000km-long crack, does not influence the density distributions, and thus, their detectability. Furthermore, we discuss how to separate the plume-originating H2O and H2O+ from exospheric H2O and H2O+. The separation depends strongly on knowledge of the density distribution of Europa's exosphere. To reference this document use: http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:6fcd16bd-8df9-46f4-b628-018474b9d4f1 DOI https://doi.org/10.1016/j.icarus.2016.10.026 Embargo date 2019-03-22 ISSN 0019-1035 Source Icarus, 289, 270-280 Part of collection Institutional Repository Document type journal article Rights © 2016 Hans L F Huybrighs, Yoshifumi Futaana, Stanislav Barabash, Martin Wieser, Peter Wurz, Norbert Krupp, Karl Heinz Glassmeier, L.L.A. Vermeersen Files PDF 1704.00912.pdf 1.55 MB Close viewer /islandora/object/uuid:6fcd16bd-8df9-46f4-b628-018474b9d4f1/datastream/OBJ/view