NASA's Universal Oceanic Clock Ticking

Image Source and Courtesy NASA 

The clock is ticking across the board. It is a universal clock and it is on countdown. Stopping it is impossible, reversing it improbable, adapting to it challenging and understanding it key. In this universal clock that races NASA leads insight with fast and adrenaline filled reports and revelations. The Universal Oceanic Clock is ticking... 

For the past months NASA has increased activity and as a result released price-less groundbreaking discoveries. The studies released in the past months and year are perhaps the pinnacle of the entire history of space exploration. Three recent NASA reports unfold a Universal Oceanic Clock, its glorious wheels are at spin. Will we understand the pieces of this momentum before the 11th hour finds us?

The most relevant ocean studies released by NASA during this year relate to the presence of oceans in diverse celestial bodies within the solar system and beyond. NASA has also been studying oceans which for long time have been extinct in different planets while at the same time studying oceans back here at home. 

On November 9 Colarado University researchers released the video report “Hidden Oceans” where they explored NASA’s next flagship mission to Jupiter’s moon Europa which could harbor conditions suitable for life in its ocean basins. 

Other NASA Missions under the “Follow the Water” Principle include Mars exploration, exploration of Saturn´s Moon and others.   

Saturn´s Moon exploration become relevant again after 10 years with the new findings of Cassini. The latest flybys -specially on the moon Enceladus broke all international headlines. On October 28 NASA concluded what they described as an “epic and historical flyby through the geysers of Enceladus”. Literally the probe dived so close to the moon that its instruments were soaked in Enceladus hydric footprint. 

Cassini did not only send back breathtaking images of Enceladus but acquired data which will aid in the understanding of alien oceans and the universal ocean cycles. 

“During the last flyby, the spacecraft passed only about 49 kilometers above the surface of Enceladus. Cassini had previously made one closer flyby, but this one was the deepest the probe had flown through the geysers themselves. The geysers are located at the south pole of Enceladus, bursting through massive fissures in the icy surface called Tiger Stripes, originating from a salty ocean below the surface,” NASA detailed. 

“One of the primary and certainly most interesting aspects of the flyby is the analysis of the plumes themselves. Previously, Cassini has detected water vapor, ice particles, sodium, potassium, methane, carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, and nitrogen, as well as both simple and complex organics. These findings have provided important clues as to the conditions in the ocean below the surface, pointing to current hydrothermal activity and heat, which make this a tentatively quite habitable environment for some kind of life, even if just microscopic,” NASA explained. 

The comparisons between the ocean environment of Jupiter's moon Europa and Saturn´s Moon Enceladus and those we see here on Earth are inevitable. Ice-surfaced oceans, hydrothermal vents, geysers and plumes are no strangers to Earth and its salted hydric basins. 

“The ocean bottom of Enceladus is also thought to be in contact with the rocky core, which could provide mineral nutrients for any putative life forms,” NASA assured. 

“Confirmation of molecular hydrogen in the plume would be an independent line of evidence that hydrothermal activity is taking place in the Enceladus ocean, on the seafloor,” said Hunter Waite, INMS team lead at Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. “The amount of hydrogen would reveal how much hydrothermal activity is going on.” On Earth hydrothermal vents are considered to be igniters of life, life-spark makers.

In a planet closer to home, planet which is still believed to home liquid water, NASA has also made a stunning find. NASA officially announced that the mystery on what happened to the vast oceans of Mars has been solved. US News & World Report reported on the first days of November that NASA's new study assures that “Solar Winds Destroyed the Ocean on Mars”. 

“NASA on Thursday unveiled data from a Mars probe that confirms the red planet once had an ocean and air, but it transformed into a frozen desert because it lost the ability to protect itself against the solar currents of the sun,” NASA stated. 

While more and more oceans -extinct or active are discovered in celestial bodies the study and revision of magnetic fields presence become primordial in the understanding of the sustainment of the basins.

The findings were reached under a program known as MAVEN -Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution probe, or MAVEN.  The extinct oceans of Mars are dated to have existed between 3.7 billion to 4.2 billion years ago time in which the Earth was an “infant”. 

Bruce Jakosky -principal investigator on the MAVEN team stated that “the mystery remains regarding exactly how -and when its core cooled and it stopped generating its magnetic field.

“Mars could have lost much of its atmospheric gas billions of years ago when the radiation and solar wind from the sun could have been stronger than they are today,” Jakosky said.

The announcement -also inevitably led to alarms back home in the sector of climate change and global climate studies. Connections between solar wind's, magnetic fields, solar storms, global climates, biological energy cycles, ocean impacts, atmospheric alterations and ocean and atmosphere relationship are studied deeply to understand climate change here on Earth. The new Mars study seemed to be a wheel of the Universal Oceanic Clock which ticks at a rate beyond that of the rate of human time...nevertheless it keeps ticking.  

On November 9 NASA Langley announced the initiation of groundbreaking study of phytoplankton and climate in Canada. Through an C-130H Hercules airborne laboratory flying to Canadian airspace NASA set the mission to launch a five-year international research campaign to study the relationship between phytoplankton and climate. The program is known as NAAMES -North Atlantic Aerosols and Marine Ecosystems Study. It is the first to combine shipboard, airborne and satellite data gathered throughout the annual life cycle of the largest phytoplankton bloom on the planet, key in the understanding of the biological cycles of ocean and their role. 

Phytoplankton -among the smallest organisms on Earth are incredible due to the fact that when grouped into a global population have the power to change completely life in the oceans and even alter the gas levels of the atmosphere. History of the Earth -specially the Cyanobacteria Revolution also known as the Oxygen Revolution -event which took place here on Earth far before humankind flourished is but just one case of how microorganisms can alter a Planet entirely. 

“Understanding phytoplankton -microscopic plants that float in the upper ocean is key to understanding how the tiny particles or aerosols they emit when they bloom control both cloud formation and the Earth's radiation budget,” said Richard Moore -airborne scientist at NASA Langley Research Center in Hampton. The radiation budget is the process by which oceans absorb and reflect the sun's rays.

"The oceans cover 70 percent of the Earth," Moore said -deputy project scientist for NAAMES. "They're vast ecosystems. Most of the world is ocean, and we don't have a great handle on the connection between the ocean and the atmosphere." These connections are a key part of the Universal Oceanic Clock.

On November 9 NASA announced a press conference to discuss “Carbon's Role in the Earth's Future Climate”. 

NASA expressed interested in the “latest insights into how Earth is responding to rising levels of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere, and what this means for our future climate”. 

Simultaneously NASA announced that they had found a new way “to track ocean currents from space”. In the published paper in Geophysical Research Letters researchers from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory JPL and the University of Texas at Austin US detail how to use a new the new sophisticated tool Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment -GRACE.

GRACE has revealed what NASA researchers describe as “pretty odd behavior in ocean circulation”. According to GRACE data the ocean's´circulation is actually slowing down. GRACE satellites are a pair of twin observing devices that orbit the Earth 137 miles from one another. Data revealed by the project relates to “critical” events, such as the alteration of transport of flow of 84.6 billion tons of water per day by the ocean's, energy involved, glacier retreat and such issues.

The Team working the Cassini Enceladus data assures that the recent dive into the mysterious plume was enough to obtain up to 10,000 particles per second using the probe’s cosmic dust analyzer. 

“Analysis of this data over the coming weeks could provide the most promising signs of habitability yet in the decade since Cassini’s initial flyby of the moon in 2005,” NASA promised more to come. 

Researchers are already studying the data from Cassini’s gas analyzer and dust detector instruments. Officially so far the instrumentations are reported to have directly sampled the moon’s plume of gas and dust-sized icy particles during the flyby.

Missions to better understand the Universal Oceanic Clock system are set for launch. Jupiter's Moon Europa, Mars and Enceladus await. For now the clock continues to tick, the pulse of every second of this universal cycle second hand represents millions of years of human time...will we understand it in time? An unanswered question...one thing is certain the view of this precise machinery is...beautifully humbling.