Tidally induced fault motion within Europa's ice shell and implications for subsurface communication development

The processes that maintain a subsurface ocean at Europa may also cause geophysical hazards within the overlying ice shell that are important to understand for any subsurface access mission. In this study, we applied 3D finite element models to better constrain the potential magnitude of tidally induced fault motion in the ice shell that a cryobot and communication hardware could experience during a subsurface mission. Models showed that displacement along a fault resulting from a static tidal stress at orbital perijove was