Mountain Views News          Saturday, May 30, 2015

THE WORLD AROUND US

14

Mountain Views-News Saturday, May 23, 2015 


NASA’S EUROPA MISSION BEGINS WITH SELECTION OF SCIENCE INSTRUMENTS

NASA has selected nine science instruments for 
a mission to Jupiter’s moon Europa, to investigate 
whether the mysterious icy moon could harbor 
conditions suitable for life.

 NASA’s Galileo mission yielded strong evidence 
that Europa, about the size of Earth’s moon, has 
an ocean beneath a frozen crust of unknown 
thickness. If proven to exist, this global ocean 
could have more than twice as much water as 
all of Earth’s oceans. With abundant salt water, 
a rocky sea floor, and the energy and chemistry 
provided by tidal heating, Europa could be the 
best place in the solar system to look for present-
day life beyond our home planet.

 “Europa has tantalized us with its enigmatic icy 
surface and evidence of a vast ocean, following 
the amazing data from 11 flybys of the Galileo 
spacecraft over a decade ago and recent Hubble 
observations suggesting plumes of water shooting 
out from the moon,” said John Grunsfeld, 
associate administrator for NASA’s Science 
Mission Directorate in Washington. “We’re 
excited about the potential of this new mission 
and these instruments to unravel the mysteries 
of Europa in our quest to find evidence of life 
beyond Earth.”

 NASA’s fiscal year 2016 budget request includes 
$30 million to formulate a mission to Europa. The 
mission would send a solar-powered spacecraft 
into a long, looping orbit around the gas giant 
Jupiter to perform repeated close flybys of Europa 
over a three-year period. In total, the mission 
would perform 45 flybys at altitudes ranging from 
16 miles to 1,700 miles.

 The payload of selected science instruments 
includes cameras and spectrometers to produce 
high-resolution images of Europa’s surface and 
determine its composition. An ice penetrating 
radar will determine the thickness of the moon’s 
icy shell and search for subsurface lakes similar 
to those beneath Antarctica. The mission also 
will carry a magnetometer to measure strength 
and direction of the moon’s magnetic field, which 
will allow scientists to determine the depth and 
salinity of its ocean.

 A thermal instrument will scour Europa’s 
frozen surface in search of recent eruptions of 
warmer water, while additional instruments will 
search for evidence of water and tiny particles 
in the moon’s thin atmosphere. NASA’s Hubble 
Space Telescope observed water vapor above the 
south polar region of Europa in 2012, providing 
the first strong evidence of water plumes. If the 
plumes’ existence is confirmed—and they’re 
linked to a subsurface ocean—it will help 
scientists investigate the chemical makeup of 
Europa’s potentially habitable environment while 
minimizing the need to drill through layers of ice.

 Last year, NASA invited researchers to submit 
proposals for instruments to study Europa. 
Thirty-three were reviewed and, of those, nine 
were selected for a mission that will launch in the 
2020s.

 “This is a giant step in our search for oases 
that could support life in our own celestial 
backyard,” said Curt Niebur, Europa program 
scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington. 
“We’re confident that this versatile set of science 
instruments will produce exciting discoveries on 
a much-anticipated mission.”

 You can contact Bob Eklund at: b.eklund@
MtnViewsNews.com.


WHERE DOES ONE SEEK PARADISE?

 

[Nyerges is the author of such books as “Self-Sufficient Home,” “Extreme 
Simplicity,” “How to Survive Anywhere,” and “Guide to Wild Foods.” He has 
been teaching self-reliance skills since 1974. He can be reached at Box 41834, 
Eagle Rock, CA 90041, or www.SchoolofSelf-Reliance.com.]

 
At one time, life stretched 
out like eternity, like the last 
scene from “The Good, The 
Bad, The Ugly,” where you knew there were winners 
and losers and fools, and you hoped desperately 
that you’d be a winner. Well, at least a good guy. 
That’s the perspective of a child, seeing the world 
through simplistic eyes, black and white, good and 
bad, right and wrong. That’s good, really, but as 
Mark Twain once noted, there is enough good in 
the worst of us, and enough bad in the best of us, 
that we should quit pretending and start working 
together. At least Twain said something like that, 
and what he meant was that only in movies and 
childhood dreams do we ever get to see absolute 
clarity which doesn’t exist in the real world.

 

In childhood, I assumed that the older bodies 
also contained minds that were more developed, 
and advanced, and therefore more objective and 
mature. I assumed that parents were the fair 
arbiters of disputes and that elected officials took 
those positions because they cared about the good 
of the people they represented. I believed in the 
Jimmy Stewart world of “It’s a Wonderful Life,” 
even though I never found it.

 

I believed that there must be a sanctuary of sanity 
somewhere where people practiced lives of sanity 
and non-prejudice, and where fraud and cheating 
were unheard of. I lived on a farm for awhile right 
after high school, and I felt that perhaps there, in 
the rough existence where your work resulted in a 
very tangible result that supported your existence, 
it was hard to cheat and defraud, and the folks had 
pride in their skills, their 

sense of community, and their honesty.

 

Could the urbanization of the world be part of the 
culprit in our fall from grace? Perhaps. 

But it’s still no excuse. Even if I never found 
Shangra-la on earth, I have not stopped believing in 
the principles by which such a place must exist. For 
example, you must keep your word. Yes, printed 
papers are OK for poor memories, and for those 
who are inclined to twist the words later to mean 
something else from the original intent. But when 
you twist your word, and bend your word, you bend 
your very soul, and you dis-integrate your very 
integrity. That’s why my father always said to keep 
your word, that a person is only as good as their 
word. Even in middle-class Pasadena, my father 
knew that there was an ineffable something about 
the giving and keeping of your word. In Shangri-la, 
you would always keep your word.

 

In my vision of Paradise, there would be work, 
but the god that we all trusted wouldn’t be money. 
Money, or some version of it, seems inescapable 
for daily commerce and for converting your work 
and time into a medium of useful, recognizable 
exchange. But in Paradise, money would naturally 
be a tool to assist others to get their own enterprises 
going, and to provide for the common good. People 
would not be obsessed by money and would not be 
driven by the desire for money. Killing for money 
would be unheard of.

Work must have a tangible result, within the 
framework of a goal. A person must naturally 
feel uplifted by doing one’s work, and when one 
knowingly works at a menial and pointless job to 
fulfill someone else’s desires and goals, it’s hard to 
feel uplifted. 

 

Of course, bits and pieces of this Shangra-la exist 
right now, everywhere, in most people. I believe that 
everyone has an innate desire to find rightness, and 
even fairness, and everyone ultimately recognizes 
the objective reality of the Law of Thought, that 
what you think and what you do has ramifications 
that are scientific result of those specific thoughts 
and actions. 

 

If you inwardly believe in the possibility of a Paradise 
on earth, you must start to grasp those principles of 
living and thinking that lead to Shangri-La. And 
though you must do so personally, on your own, 
it is fortunate that there are others, if you can find 
them, who are also seeking a higher road. 

 

Shangri-La is not a place that you find, but rather, a 
place that you earn the right to be a part of, by the 
evolution of your thought and actions. What does 
that mean? What must someone do? Again, the 
answers are everywhere, hidden in plain view. They 
go by such names as learning to think, separating 
feeling from emotions, distinguishing empathy 
from sympathy, learning to use words precisely, 
working hard to see world events objectively, and 
not subjectively based on your personal cultural 
bias. It means learning the practical value and 
living the precepts taught by all the great Way-
showers of history, from all cultures. Ever heard 
of the Golden Rule? That’s a good place to start. 
How about the 10 Commandments? Another good 
starting point.

 

One winter night during high school, my friend 
Nathaniel and I bicycled into a little side canyon 
of the Angeles National Forest, and we made 
a safe little fire in our campground and talked 
about the meaning of life and how we thought 
that civilization might fail. It had never occurred 
to us that we are barely civilized now, and we only 
believe we are “civilized” because of our material 
wealth and technological toys. We bemoaned 
the fact that society is on the fast road to uncivil 
barbarousness, and wondered what could be done, 
and what should be done. 

 

We always toyed with the idea of becoming hermits 
and hiding out in a cave somewhere, but both of 
us were way too social to live out our lives in a 
cave. By whatever choices we made, we felt that 
everyone should be a good example, and no one 
should assume that there is no hope for the future. 
Our civility, our culture, our sense of civilization, 
after all, is an internal concept that we first keep 
alive inside our thinking. Once that flame is bright 
within, it is proper to share with others, and attempt 
to be a part of the solution to the many problems we 
see all around.

 
SANDY RADEY626.821.1249
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