A Specialist Discussion Meeting organised by: Dominic Fortes (UCL) andrew.fortesucl.ac.uk and Geraint Jones (MSSL) ghjmssl.ucl.ac.uk
Summary: Regional or global volumes of liquid water are thought to exist inside several icy bodies in the outer solar system, from tiny Enceladus up to the large Galilean satellite Ganymede. These aqueous reservoirs represent incomplete freezing of primordial 'magma' oceans, and therefore provide us with an important insight into the general chemical, structural and thermal evolution of solid planetary bodies, many of which had silicate magma oceans during their early history. Moreover, these oceans are potential habitats for extraterrestrial life far from the Sun, and may be the most abundant class of habitable environment, by volume, in the universe. The objective of this meeting is to bring together the diverse communities of oceanography, planetary geology, mineral physics, and astrobiology to discuss the state of the art in observational and theoretical knowledge of subsurface oceans in icy satellites.
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Website: http://www.ras.org.uk