A large NASA spacecraft is prepared to travel toward Jupiter and Europa, its moon.
CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida: One of the finest chances to locate extraterrestrial life, Jupiter and its moon Europa, will soon be visited by a NASA spacecraft.
Under the frozen surface of the moon, where an ocean is believed to be sloshing pretty near to the surface, Europa Clipper will look. Instead than looking for life, it will ascertain whether the environment is conducive to it. It would take another operation to remove any potential bacteria from the area.
Program scientist Curt Niebur stated, “It’s a chance for us to explore not a world that might have been habitable billions of years ago, but a world that might be habitable today — right now.”
Clipper is the largest spacecraft NASA has ever built for extraterrestrial exploration because of its enormous solar panels. It will travel 5 1/2 years to reach Jupiter and will pass by Europa’s surface at a distance of only 16 miles (25 kilometers), which is significantly closer than any other probe.
This month, SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket is scheduled to launch from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. The mission will cost $5,2 billion.
Europa is nearly the size of our moon and is one of Jupiter’s 95 known moons. It is covered in an ice sheet that is thought to be between 10 and 15 miles (15 and 24 kilometers) thick. It is thought by scientists that beneath this frozen crust lies an ocean that may be as deep as 80 miles (120 kilometers). What seem like surface geysers have been observed by the Hubble Space Telescope. Together with Ganymede, Io, and Callisto, Europa is one of Jupiter’s four so-called Galilean moons, having been discovered by Galileo in 1610.
What kind of life might Europa support? For life as we know it, chemical substances and an energy source are also necessary in addition to water. That might be thermal vents on the ocean floor in the case of Europa. Any life would be primitive, according to deputy project scientist Bonnie Buratti, much like the bacterial life that first emerged in Earth’s deep ocean vents. “This mission will not reveal anything because we are not able to see that deeply,” she stated. Clipper’s primary task is to determine whether the moon might host life in its ocean or maybe in any pockets of water in the ice, in contrast to missions to Mars where habitability is one of several problems.
When its solar wings and antennas are extended, Clipper weighs close to 13,000 pounds (6,000 kilograms) and resembles a basketball court, measuring more than 100 feet (30 meters) from end to end. Because Jupiter is so far from the sun, larger solar panels are required. The main body, which is roughly the size of a camper, is crammed with nine scientific instruments, including as tools to explore Europa’s delicate atmosphere and surface, cameras to image almost the whole moon, and radar to break through ice. The name evokes memories of the fast-moving vessels from bygone eras.
It will take 1.8 billion miles (3 billion kilometers) to travel round trip to Jupiter. The spaceship will pass past Earth in late 2026 and Mars early the following year for more oomph. After arriving to Jupiter in 2030, science operations start the following year. It will encounter Europa 49 times as it round Jupiter. The mission culminates in 2034 with a scheduled collision with Ganymede, the largest moon in the solar system and home to Jupiter.
Other than the sun, there is more radiation surrounding Jupiter than any other place in our solar system. Europa is particularly dangerous to spacecraft because it travels through Jupiter’s radiation bands as it orbits the gas giant. Clipper’s electronics are therefore housed inside a vault with thick walls made of zinc and aluminum. There would be no life on Europa’s surface due to all this radiation. However, it might disintegrate water molecules and possibly release oxygen into the ocean, which might support marine life.
NASA was worried earlier this year that the spacecraft’s many transistors might not be able to survive the high radiation levels. However, engineers judged after several months of investigation that the mission could go forward as planned.
In the 1970s, two Pioneer spacecraft from NASA and two Voyager spacecraft passed Jupiter. Though they did so from a considerable distance, the Voyagers produced the first detailed images of Europa. Throughout the 1990s, NASA’s Galileo spacecraft made multiple flybys of the moon, coming as near as 124 miles (200 kilometers). NASA’s Juno probe is still active around Jupiter, and it has uploaded new images to Europa’s photo album. Launched last year, the European Space Agency’s Juice mission will reach Jupiter a year after Clipper.
Similar to Europa, it is believed that Ganymede, Jupiter’s massive moon, has a subsurface ocean. However, because of its significantly thicker ice crust, which may be up to 100 miles (160 kilometers) thick, it is more difficult to explore the interior. It’s possible that Callisto’s ice cover is considerably thicker, concealing an ocean. Though it is much farther away than Jupiter, the moon Enceladus of Saturn has geysers erupting upward. Likewise, Titan, Saturn’s moon, is thought to have an underground sea. Although there have been no proven ocean worlds discovered outside of our solar system, scientists are confident that they exist and may even be rather widespread.
Clipper carries messages from Earth, much like many other robotic explorers did before it. A metal plate with a triangle shape is fastened to the electronics vault. A graphic titled “water words” features 104 different language renditions of the word for water on one side. On the other side is a silicon chip with the names of 2.6 million people who registered to ride along vicariously, as well as a poem about the moon written by American poet laureate Ada Limon.
The Science and Educational Media Group of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute provides support to the Associated Press Health and Science Department. All content is the exclusive responsibility of the AP.
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