Discovery News gets all excited by NASA-JPL’s announcement that they’re budgeting for a robotic mission to seek life on Jupiter’s moon Europa:
In response to this news, and after 15 years exploring Europa mission concepts, JPL senior research scientist Robert Pappalardo said that most mission concepts have either been too small, too big or just too expensive, but “we believe we have now found the one that is just right.”
“We call this concept the Europa Clipper,” he said.
The Clipper concept has been an idea undergoing preliminary studies for some time, consisting of a Jupiter-orbiting spacecraft that will make multiple flybys of the Jovian moon Europa over a 3 year period. The spacecraft will dive deep into Jupiter’s radiation belts to fly over Europa’s surface approximately 45 times during its primary mission.
NASA’s Cassini spacecraft, which is currently orbiting Saturn, has carried out similar flybys of moon Titan, constructing a comprehensive map of its surface and measuring the moon’s thick atmosphere. The Europa Clipper will be focused on Europa in an effort to understand its habitable potential.
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Although Europa’s ocean may be up to 100 kilometers (62 miles) deep, the conditions at the bottom of that monstrous abyss may be akin to the environment at the bottom of Earth’s comparatively shallow Mariana Trench, the deepest region of the Pacific Ocean, which is 11 kilometers (6.8 miles) deep. Complex biology has evolved in Mariana’s cold, dark environment, so it’s not such a stretch to think that if there is life in Europa’s ocean, it may also be thriving, extracting energy not from the sun (via photosynthesis), but from chemosynthesis near hydrothermal vents.
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For the Europa Clipper to explore the moon at such close proximity would require some tough shielding and clever orbital planning to protect the spacecraft’s sensitive electronics.
“It’s a jungle out there around Jupiter! It’s a jungle of radiation,” said Sara Susca, Europa Clipper payload systems engineer.