@...@**It*s one of the best candidates for an ecosystem,** said Rónadh Cox of Williams College, Mass//, regarding Europa*s ocean// **But how do you get biological precursers into the ocean?**
To find out if icy, chemical~rich comets could do it, she ©and her student, Aaron Bauer, modeled impacts by the full range of comets that have been influenced by Jupiter, and brought into relatively short orbits around the sun ~~ so~called Jupiter Family Comets// They simulated the collisions of these known comets into a range of ice thicknesses// Their results were surprising and led to a new insights into the moon*s actual ice crust thickness//
@...@**It turns out it doesn*t matter how thick the crust is,** said Cox, the lead author of a paper about the research in the latest issue of Journal of Geophysical Research~Planets// That*s because it*s all a matter of the frequency of impacts over the very long window© of opportunity ~~ in this case the almost five billion~years that the solar system has been around//