#Galactic science moon village series
The research conducted by Mills during a series of summer internships at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California will get a major boost when NASA's Europa Clipper mission heads to Europa in 2024. "This helps us understand how landslides might be shaping moon surfaces over time." We've estimated the size of moonquakes and how big the landslides could be," research lead author and University of Arizona in Tucson graduate student Mackenzie Mills, said in a statement (opens in new tab). "We found the surface shaking from moonquakes would be enough to cause surface material to rush downhill in landslides.
This revealed that some of these seismic events would have been strong enough to hoist up debris that then rolls downhill, spreading out as it does so and smoothing out the landscape of the moons. The team came to the surprising conclusion when they set about measuring the dimensions of these ridges, thought to be steep slopes caused by the surface breaking along a fault line with one side dropping in what scientists call "tectonic fault scarps." They then applied the measurements to seismic models which allowed them to estimate the power of moonquakes in the history of these moons. The explanation put forward in this new research doesn't require the presence of liquid on the surface of these icy moons, however.
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