Is there another place in our solar system that could support life? A monumental NASA probe is poised to launch on Monday, embarking on a five-and-a-half-year journey to Europa, one of Jupiter’s many moons. This ambitious mission, known as Europa Clipper, will take the first detailed steps towards answering this captivating question.
The Europa Clipper mission will allow NASA to unveil the secrets of this enigmatic moon, which scientists believe holds a vast ocean of liquid water beneath its icy surface. This tantalizing prospect has sparked intense curiosity about Europa’s potential to harbor life. The launch is scheduled for “no earlier than” Monday, October 14th, from Cape Canaveral in Florida, aboard a powerful SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket.
“Europa is one of the most promising places to look for life beyond Earth,” declared NASA official Gina DiBraccio at a news conference last month. While the mission won’t directly search for signs of life, it will instead seek answers to a fundamental question: Does Europa possess the necessary ingredients to support life? If the answer is yes, a subsequent mission would be required to explore further and potentially detect signs of life.
“It’s a chance for us to explore not a world that might have been habitable billions of years ago”, like Mars, Europa Clipper program scientist Curt Niebur told reporters last month, “but a world that might be habitable today, right now”.
This ambitious probe stands as the largest ever designed by NASA for interplanetary exploration, spanning a remarkable 30 meters when its immense solar panels – engineered to capture the weak sunlight reaching Jupiter – are fully extended.
A Journey Through Time and Space
While Europa’s existence has been known since 1610, the first close-up images were captured by the Voyager probes in 1979, revealing mysterious reddish lines crisscrossing its surface. The next probe to visit Jupiter’s icy moon was NASA’s Galileo probe in the 1990s, which provided compelling evidence of the existence of an ocean beneath the surface.
This time, the Europa Clipper probe will be equipped with an array of sophisticated instruments, including cameras, a spectrograph, radar, and a magnetometer to measure its magnetic forces. The mission will delve deep into the secrets of Europa, seeking to determine the structure and composition of its icy surface, its depth, and even the salinity of its ocean, as well as the interplay between the two. The mission aims to uncover whether water rises to the surface in certain locations.
The mission’s ultimate goal is to understand whether the three essential ingredients 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. However, these bacteria would likely reside at depths beyond the reach of the Europa Clipper.
Unraveling the Mysteries of Habitability
But what if Europa turns out to be uninhabitable after all? “That also opens up a whole wealth of questions: Why did we think this? And why is it not there?” said Nikki Fox, an associate administrator at NASA. This potential outcome underscores the value of scientific exploration – even in the absence of a definitive answer, new knowledge and understanding can be gained.
A Long and Winding Road
The probe will journey 2.9 billion kilometers (1.8 billion miles) during its trek to Jupiter, with arrival expected in April 2030. The main mission will then continue for another four years. The probe will make 49 close flybys over Europa, coming as close as 25 kilometers (16 miles) above the surface. It will endure intense radiation—the equivalent of several million chest x-rays on each pass.
Approximately 4,000 people have been working on the $5.2 billion mission for nearly a decade. NASA asserts that the investment is justified by the immense value of the data that will be collected.
If our solar system proves to be home to two habitable worlds (Europa and Earth), “think of what that means when you extend that result to the billions and billions of other solar systems in this galaxy,” said Niebur, the Europa Clipper program scientist. “Setting aside the ‘Is there life?’ question on Europa, just the habitability question in and of itself opens up a huge new paradigm for searching for life in the galaxy,” he added.
The Europa Clipper will operate concurrently with the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Juice probe, which will study two other moons of Jupiter – Ganymede and Callisto. These missions represent a concerted effort to unlock the secrets of Jupiter’s fascinating moon system, potentially rewriting our understanding of life beyond Earth.