This artistic image shows the Europa Clipper mission heading toward an icy moon of Jupiter.
NASA/JPL-Caltech
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NASA/JPL-Caltech
The long-awaited mission to an icy moon of Jupiter will take place in just a few weeks, NASA officials said Tuesday in a launch preview event.
The moon Europa is thought to have the right conditions for life – but there is one catch.
Any life could be hiding under a deep global ocean, plus a surface layer of ice that could be more than ten miles thick. So for this mission, the researchers won’t be looking for life.
“We’re looking for surface chemicals, organic chemicals that are precursors to life,” he said. Bonnie Buratideputy project scientist for NASA’s Europa Clipper mission.
Scientists have gathered a lot of evidence that the ingredients for life exist on Europa, like water in the ocean below its surface, she said, “but we have to go there to find out.”
NASA aims to launch Europa Clipper starting on October 10, aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket.
“We scientists have dreamed of a mission like Europa Clipper for more than twenty years. We have been working to build it for ten years,” the note said. Laurie Leshindirector of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “It will take another ten years—because Jupiter is so far away—until we have all the science in the bag. This is really a very long-term investment and journey.”
The spacecraft’s 1.8 billion-mile trip to Jupiter will take more than five years. Once there, it will spend years making dozens of flybys of Europa.
“We’re not landing on Europa. We’re going to be about 25 kilometers above the surface, which is about 16 miles,” he said. Jordan Evansproject manager of the task.
Europa Clipper is equipped with large solar panels because Jupiter is much farther from the Sun than Earth is. The spacecraft’s solar panels stretch out like a pair of wings about 100 feet long, making it the largest interplanetary probe NASA has ever built and launched.
Evans said a challenging part of the mission is making sure the spacecraft can withstand the intense radiation around Europa.
During each flyby, he said, “the spacecraft’s surface is exposed to the equivalent of several million chest X-rays. Yet the Europa Clipper instruments should be sensitive enough to collect the critical information scientists need to learn about the moon.”
Europa is about the same size as Earth’s Moon, but its surface has very few impact craters, suggesting that some active geological process took place to clear them away.
The Moon was first discovered by the famous astronomer Galileo Galilei in 1610, and a NASA spacecraft named after him later flew past and has been discovered that Europa may have a subsurface ocean.
The moon’s icy surface is crisscrossed with mysterious dark streaks, and has a so-called “chaotic terrain” filled with cracks and crevices.
The suite of instruments on board Europa Clipper, including ice-penetrating radar and high-resolution cameras, will help scientists better understand this geological chaos, allowing them to decipher how the subsurface ocean might interact with the layers of ice above.
“You know, there are things that we dream about that we can observe, like DNA or RNA. But we don’t expect to see them,” Buratti said. “It’s really just looking for a habitable environment and evidence of the components of life, not life itself.”
After the mission ends, managers say Europa Clipper will be directed to make an emergency landing on another moon, Ganymede. Like Europa, Ganymede is thought to have an interior ocean, but it doesn’t appear to touch the surface.
Ganymede is the primary target of the European spacecraft, JUICElaunched last year and is expected to arrive at Jupiter in 2031. That means JUICE is likely to observe Europa Clipper slamming into the moon.
“A lot can happen between now and the end of the Europa Clipper mission, but it’s certainly possible,” Evans said.
