Ocean worlds in our solar system
Title: Ocean worlds in our solar system
DNr: Berzelius-2022-52
Project Type: LiU Berzelius
Principal Investigator: Shahab Fatemi <shahab.fatemi@umu.se>
Affiliation: Umeå universitet
Duration: 2022-03-08 – 2022-10-01
Classification: 10303
Homepage: http://www.amitiscode.com
Keywords:

Abstract

Liquid water is an essential building block for life on Earth, as we know it. However, Earth is not the only ocean world in our solar system. Nearly 25 years ago, observations indicated that the icy moons of Jupiter and Saturn could harbour vast amounts of liquid water under their icy crusts - “subsurface oceans”, perhaps with more water than all of Earth’s surface water combined [e.g., 1-4]. The goal of our project is to provide a detailed understanding of the plasma environment of these moons and how the plasma associated currents affect the observed signals from the subsurface oceans of these icy worlds. This study will lead us towards better understanding on the origins, evolutions, and environments of these bodies. Numerically solving this problem requires significant computational resources, therefore left entirely untouched for over a few decades. We will use Amitis, the first 3-dimensional hybrid model of plasma developed by Fatemi that runs entirely on GPUs [5]. Recently, we have successfully upgraded our model so that it runs on multi-GPU platforms which enables us to solve, for the first time, the most challenging and computationally intensive problems associated with the ocean worlds, their plasma environment and subsurface oceans. In order to solve these problems, we need to have access to computational resources that are optimized for multi-GPU computation and provide large memories on each GPU (e.g., NVIDIA A40/A100 or similar). We currently have three research projects funded by the National Research Council (VR) and the Swedish National Space Agency (Rymdstyrelsen) to study the ocean worlds in our solar system. References 1) https://www.nature.com/articles/27394 2) https://doi.org/10.1006/icar.2000.6456 3) https://doi.org/10.1016/j.icarus.2007.11.010 4) https://doi.org/10.1016/j.icarus.2021.114872 5) https://doi.org/10.1088/1742-6596/837/1/012017