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There is now a CONTENT FREEZE for Mercury while we switch to a new platform. It began on Friday, March 10 at 6pm and will end on Wednesday, March 15 at noon. No new content can be created during this time, but all material in the system as of the beginning of the freeze will be migrated to the new platform, including users and groups. Functionally the new site is identical to the old one. webteam@gatech.edu
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We knew it was only a matter of time before news outlets this week sought out School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences Assistant Professor Britney Schmidt regarding Jupiter's frosty moon Europa, a prime candidate for life thanks to its briny ocean. Schmidt, after all, co-authored a 2017 study that looked at Hubble Space Telescope images and found a second possible eruption of water from the same location on the moon's surface, suggesting cryovolcanism on Europa. We figured that media outlets would want Schmidt's opinion of a new study that says those water plumes were active during a 1997 fly-by of the Galileo space probe. Schmidt is busy working on the Europa Clipper project for NASA, which plans to send an probe to orbit the moon. She's also working on Icefin, an autonomous underwater vehicle for exploring icy oceans on Earth and elsewhere in the solar system.