Water Worlds of Our Solar System with Olivier Witasse, Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer

<p>Hello everyone!</p><p>This week on The Cosmic Companion, we will explore The Water Worlds of the Solar System, talking with Olivier Witasse from the European Space Agency, Project Scientist for the Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer, or Juice, now on its way to the Jovian system.</p><p>Join me, your trusty celestial tour guide, as we don our intellectual swim trunks and dive into the water worlds of our solar system. </p><p>Water, essential for all life on Earth, was once thought to be rare in the solar system.</p><p>Large quantities of water ice are now believed to sit inside deep craters at the poles of the Moon, where sunlight never strikes. Ice deposits at the South Pole of the Moon alone could hold more than 150 times as much water as the Mediterranean Sea.</p><p>These vast deposits of water mean these regions are where the first human settlements on the Moon will soon rise. </p><p>But native life seems unlikely inside huge blocks of solid ice billions of years old. </p><p>[<<< Shows what you know. I live in the coolest neighborhood in the solar system!]</p><p>Mars was, likely, once home to massive oceans. But now, water on this world is thought to be restricted to thimble-sized deposits buried a couple metres beneath its ruddy surface. Although microbial life might exist in these tiny abodes, you really can’t do much chemistry in a thimble.</p><p>[>>> What is wrong with this guy, seriously? I’ve raised over 674,000 children in this thimble, and they turned out just fine!]</p><p>Next up is the King of the Planets. Of the 80–95 known moons of Jupiter, three are now believed to house vast oceans of liquid water.</p><p>Callisto is the most heavily cratered object in our solar system. Once thought to be a dead body, evidence for subsurface oceans was spotted by the Galileo spacecraft in the 1990s. This same craft also found a thin atmosphere of carbon dioxide, similar to the one in Isaac Asimov’s story “The Callistan Menace.” Unlike that story however, giant caterpillars were nowhere to be seen.</p><p>[___ Dude! I’m