Exploring the tidal responses of ocean worlds with PyALMA3

Abstract

Observations of the tidal response of celestial bodies quantified by the Love numbers are highly relevant in planetary geophysical investigations because they provide unique insight into the interior structures. For example, the high sensitivity of tidal deformations to the properties of the oceans detected beneath the icy surfaces of some moons is of paramount importance for investigations of their habitability. We present here PyALMA3, a software framework developed in Python devoted to the computation of planetary Love numbers. PyALMA3 is based on ALMA3, a previous version developed in Fortran. Conversion to Python significantly improves the accessibility and portability of the software. We tested PyALMA3 by applying it to the exploration of the tidal responses of Europa and the other Galilean moons. We show that accurate modeling of effects such as the viscoelastic deformations of ice and the water density gradient in the ocean (variations of 2−3% on the real part of k2) will be important in the context of geophysical investigations that will be conducted by future missions targeting icy moons, such as Europa Clipper and JUICE.