英语听力：自然百科 行星旅行指南：木星 Jupiter—15

When Galileo took a closer look at Europa, the picture changed.

 

Europa is a fascinating object. If you imagine descending¹ onto a world that looks every place like the frozen ways of the Arctic and the Antarctic, you’ll get a pretty good impression of what’s going on. It’s very, very bright because the ice is very reflective, and broken up in places where it looks like you have/ basically icy rafts on the surface. It would be like flying over a moon-sized ice field, basically. And landing on the surface you would not see anylarge mountains, you would see crisscrossing ridges² that would look like killer³ ski-slopes every place.

 

Killer ski-slopes with pale pink stripes and all with the icy surface at a very cool 260 degrees Fahrenheit⁴ below zero.

 

It’s a… the ice is so cold. It’s… it did not just really, really hard like…

 

Yeah yeah yeah. It… that’s just like rocks. So it’s… it’s as hard as rock at the surface of Europa.

 

No doubt, the first person to return from the ski-slopes of Europa will have some pretty tall stories to tell. Europa specialist, NASA’s Bob Pappalardo would like to be one of them.

 

Oh, I love to get down on the surface of Europa. To walk around that surface would be probably a kind of crunching⁵ to your bone. It’s a very bizarre place and really stretches our minds to think about what’s possible in an ice world that’s orbiting a giant planet, like Jupiter.

 

Europa itself is stretched by the gravitational strain of being locked in an orbit with Io and Ganymede around its giant host.

 

Every Europan day as it orbits Jupiter, the stresses rotate around. And if a crack forms, moving at just the right speed across Europa’s surface about the speed / a person can walk, it would follow a curved path and explain the pattern that we see on the surface. You’d be able to hear the cracking, probably, of Europa’s ice shell. You couldn’t hear that if your head were in space. But as soon as you put your head to the ice, you probably hear Europa creaking like a boat.

1 descending   

n. 下行 adj. 下降的

参考例句：

• The results are expressed in descending numerical order . 结果按数字降序列出。
• The climbers stopped to orient themselves before descending the mountain. 登山者先停下来确定所在的位置，然后再下山。

2 ridges   

n.脊( ridge的名词复数 )；山脊；脊状突起；大气层的)高压脊

参考例句：

• The path winds along mountain ridges. 峰回路转。
• Perhaps that was the deepest truth in Ridges's nature. 在里奇斯的思想上，这大概可以算是天经地义第一条了。

3 killer   

n.杀人者，杀人犯，杀手，屠杀者

参考例句：

• Heart attacks have become Britain's No.1 killer disease.心脏病已成为英国的头号致命疾病。
• The bulk of the evidence points to him as her killer.大量证据证明是他杀死她的。

4 Fahrenheit   

n./adj.华氏温度；华氏温度计(的)

参考例句：

• He was asked for the boiling point of water in Fahrenheit.他被问到水的沸点是华氏多少度。
• The thermometer reads 80 degrees Fahrenheit.寒暑表指出华氏80度。

5 crunching   

v.嘎吱嘎吱地咬嚼( crunch的现在分词 )；嘎吱作响；（快速大量地）处理信息；数字捣弄

参考例句：

• The horses were crunching their straw at their manger. 这些马在嘎吱嘎吱地吃槽里的草。 来自《简明英汉词典》
• The dog was crunching a bone. 狗正嘎吱嘎吱地嚼骨头。 来自《简明英汉词典》