Africa Water, Sanitation & Hygiene November - December 2016 vol.11 No.6 | Page 42

Roundup

Grant received for human resources in sanitation

Europa moon ‘spewing water jets’

Jupiter’s icy moon Europa

From the section Science &
Environment is one of the best search targets for extraterrestrial life in the Solar System

UNESCO-IHE receives grant to strengthen human
resources in sanitation via postgraduate education
and professional training. The Bill & Melinda Gates
Foundation grant will accelerate the impact of education
and training on sanitation. The grant will be primarily used
to develop and implement a new Professional Master of
Science Programme in Non-Sewered Sanitation, jointly
with partners from South-East Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa
and Latin America.

Further evidence has been obtained to show that Jupiter’s
icy moon Europa throws jets of water out into space.
Scientists first reported the behaviour in 2013 using
the Hubble telescope, but have now made a follow-up
sighting.
It is significant because Europa, with its huge subsurface
ocean of liquid water, is one of the most likely places to
find microbial life beyond Earth.
Flying through the jets with an instrumented spacecraft
would be an effective way to test the possibility.
One could even attempt to capture a sample of ejected
material and bring it back to Earth for more detailed
biological analysis.

The new programme will be developed and provided by
world experts from both academia and practice and will
be simultaneously delivered at several partner universities.
The project will also include an expansion of the current
UNESCO-IHE Graduate Professional Diploma Program
in Sanitation, in terms of both content and scope and
will ensure its adoption by several partner institutions
worldwide.

The alternative - of trying to land on the moon and drill
through perhaps tens of kilometres of ice to examine the
ocean’s water - would be immensely challenging.

Besides the development of many e-learning credited
courses in non-sewered sanitation, a number of Massive
Open Online Courses (MOOCs) will be developed and
made accessible to the global sanitation community.
Among beneficiaries of the grant will be recipients of
scholarships, who will enroll on a special career tracking
programme embedded in the recently established Global
Faecal Sludge Management Learning Alliance. The
programme will yield several hundreds of well-educated
and trained sanitation professionals, that will help people,
particularly those with the greatest needs, to lead healthy,
productive lives.

Ten times Hubble looked and on three of those occasions
it spied what appeared to be “dark fingers” extending
from the edge of Europa.

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Africa Water, Sanitation & Hygiene • November - December 2016

Hubble made its latest identification by studying Europa
as it passed in front of Jupiter.
The telescope looked in ultraviolet wavelengths to see if
the giant planet’s light was in any way being absorbed by
material emanating from the moon’s surface.

William Sparks, the lead astronomer on the study, said he
could think of no natural phenomenon other than water
plumes that might produce such protuberances.
“We’re not aware of any instrumental artefacts that could
cause these features; they are statistically significant. But
we remain cautious because we are working at difficult
wavelengths for Hubble,” he told reporters.
Source: BBC Science Correspondent