Royal Society PhilTransA Manuscript

The discovery of Europa's subsurface ocean, inferred from Galileo's magnetometer measurements, has spawned a strong desire by the planetary community to return to assess the ocean's habitability based on the magnetic induction signal it generates. NASA has since formulated and developed the Europa Clipper mission with exactly that goal, anticipating its arrival in the Jovian system in April 2030. In parallel, ESA has developed the Jupiter Icy moons Explorer mission to further investigate the interior of Ganymede, scheduled to arrive about a year later. Therefore, an extensive amount of work has been devoted to developing methods for making sense of magnetic induction measurements for characterizing oceans within icy moons throughout the solar system, including those in the Neptune and Uranus systems which are ideal laboratories for such an investigation. We present one such method, involving a 'big-data' inverse and forward modeling approach that leverages self-consistent interior models used to infer ocean and ice shell properties of various moons that respond inductively to the dynamic magnetic environments in which they reside. We demonstrate the method on a hypothetical ocean within Umbriel, showing the ocean thickness and conductivity constraints that can be inferred from a Monte Carlo error analysis using a 3-flyby mission concept.