Power in space · Generation, transmission, storage, use · Government and first-party sources
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Image of the Day · 2026-07-11

A Bell Struck Under the Ice

A fission core melted through Europa's shell rings outward like a struck bell — its warmth counted in circles.

An artistic imagining, not real hardware. Abstract line-work poster: on a near-black blue field, dozens of fine concentric ice-gray circles share one center, where a small white-cyan disc glows like a reactor core. A saturated cyan annulus of rings marks a liquid melt moat around the core, bounded by two brighter cyan circles. Ring spacing tightens into two vibrating optical bands, alternate rings dim in a mid annulus, a dial of 72 short radial ticks circles the moat, and straight hairline fracture lines cross the field but stop dead at the melt front. A faint Swiss module grid and a thin margin frame underlie everything. Purely procedural geometry; no text, no hardware depicted literally, nothing shown exists.
An artistic imagining, drawn procedurally, of a fission power station melted deep into Europa's ice shell — seen straight down its bore, its decay heat counted outward as concentric melt rings while the moon's straight surface fractures stop at the liquid melt front. Europa's subsurface ocean is real Galileo-era science and nuclear melt probes are studied concepts, but no such station exists. Image: poweringspace.com. Artistic imagining.
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