Is there anywhere else in our solar system that could support life? A key NASA mission is set to depart on Monday on a five-and-a-half-year journey to Europa, one of Jupiter’s many moons, in the first detailed step towards exploring it.
We’re going on a 1.8 billion mile journey to the ocean world – Jupiter’s moon, Europa!
@EuropaClipper Set to launch on Monday, October 14 @spacex Falcon Heavy rocket from 12:06 p.m. ET (1606 UTC) @NASAKennedyUse #Ask NASA To send us your questions.– NASA (@NASA) 14 October 2024
The Europa Clipper mission will allow the US space agency to uncover new details about the moon, which scientists believe may have an ocean of liquid water beneath its icy surface.
It is scheduled to lift off on Monday, Oct. 14, aboard a powerful SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket from Cape Canaveral, Florida, NASA said in a statement.
“Europa is one of the most promising places to look for life beyond Earth,” NASA official Gina DiBraccio said at a news conference last month.
The mission will not directly look for signs of life, but will seek to answer the question: Are there elements in Europa that would allow life to exist?
If it does, another mission will have to travel to try to locate it.
“This is not an opportunity for us to explore a world like Mars that may have been habitable billions of years ago,” Europa Clipper program scientist Kurt Niebuhr told reporters last month, “but an opportunity to explore a world that Which may be habitable today or now.
This probe is the largest probe ever designed by NASA for interplanetary exploration.
When its huge solar panels – designed to capture the weak light that reaches Jupiter – are fully extended, it is 30 meters wide.
Primitive life?
While Europa’s existence has been known since 1610, the first close-up images were taken by the Voyager probe in 1979, revealing mysterious red lines on its surface.
The next probe to reach Jupiter’s icy moon was NASA’s Galileo probe in the 1990s, which found that it was highly likely that the moon was home to an ocean.
This time, the Europa Clipper probe will carry a number of sophisticated instruments, including cameras, a spectrograph, radar and a magnetometer to measure its magnetic forces.
The mission will focus on determining the composition and structure of Europa’s icy surface, its depth and even the salinity of its ocean, as well as the way the two interact – for example, to find out whether Places where water rises to the surface.
Its purpose is to understand whether the three elements necessary for life are present: water, energy and certain chemical compounds.
If these conditions exist on Europa, life could be found in the ocean in the form of primitive bacteria, explained Bonnie Buratti, the mission’s deputy project scientist.
But the bacteria will likely be too deep for Europa Clipper to see.
And what if Europa becomes uninhabitable after all? “It also opens up a lot of questions: Why did we think this? And why isn’t it?” said Nikki Fox, an associate administrator at NASA.
49 flyby
The probe will cover a distance of 2.9 billion kilometers (1.8 billion miles) during its journey to Jupiter, which is expected to reach in April 2030.
The main mission will run for the next four years.
The probe will make 49 close flybys over Europa, coming as close as 25 kilometers (16 mi) above the surface.
It will be subjected to intense radiation – the equivalent of several million chest X-rays on each pass.
Nearly 4,000 people have been working on the $5.2 billion mission for nearly a decade.
NASA says the investment is justified given the importance of the data to be collected.
If our solar system turns out to be home to two habitable worlds (Europa and Earth), “think about what it means when you extend this result to the billions and billions of other solar systems in this galaxy,” Europa Clipper. Niebuhr said. Program Scientist.
“‘what a life?’ “Putting aside the question on Europa, the habitability question itself opens up a huge new paradigm for the search for life in the galaxy,” he said.
Europa Clipper will work alongside the European Space Agency (ESA)’s Juice probe, which will study Jupiter’s two other moons – Ganymede and Callisto.
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