NASA prepares to send spacecraft to icy moon Jupiter may reveal extraterrestrial life in a vast ocean hidden beneath its ice-covered surface.
The Europa Clipper mission is set to blast off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Monday at 12.06pm local time, with an original plan to launch on Thursday due to winds from Hurricane Milton.
Barring any further complications, the six-ton spacecraft – the largest NASA has ever built for a planetary mission – will fly past Mars and circle Earth toward Jupiter, covering nearly 2 billion miles before reaching its destination in 2030.
While the $5bn (£3.8bn) mission won't look for life on the frigid Jovian moon, a suite of probes will scan Europa's surface for fingerprints of organic compounds and gas emissions from the moon to assess whether it is habitable. .
“This is an opportunity to explore a world that is habitable today, not a world that was habitable billions of years ago,” said project scientist Kurt Nieber.
The spacecraft measures over 100 feet end-to-end, thanks to the super-sized solar panels needed to generate enough power for the probe's electrical systems far from the Sun. It has nine instruments, including cameras to map the moon's surface and radar to peer beneath the moon's thick ice.
Previous observations of Europa have revealed giant water plumes spewing from its icy surface, and a source that suggests an 80-mile-deep underground ocean contains water twice as salty as Earth beneath a 10- to 15-mile-thick layer of ice. If life had arisen on a Jovian moon the size of Earth's moon, telltale compounds might have lurked in the effervescent waters.
Beyond the usual dangers of launch, the spacecraft faces intense and computer-frying radiation levels once it makes its observations of Europa. Jupiter is surrounded by an enormous magnetic field that repels charged particles and slams them into Europa. Intense radiation bathes any spacecraft attempting to fly around the body.
For safety, Europa Clipper's sensitive electronics are housed in an aluminum-shielded case, and instead of orbiting Europa, it will circle Jupiter, from where it will perform 49 looping flybys of the moon every few weeks.
Although limiting the time the spacecraft spends in Europa's most intense radiation field, each flyby, lasting less than a day, exposes the probe to the radiation equivalent of 1 m of chest X-rays.
For all the damage it can cause, radiation can fuel life. If high-energy particles in Europa's thin atmosphere split water molecules into oxygen and hydrogen, some of the oxygen could reach the ocean and react with other chemicals to provide energy for alien microbes.
“If you think of all the water on Earth and double it, we think Europa has as much water,” said Dr Caroline Harper, head of space science at the UK Space Agency. “Water is essential to life as we know it, and if we're going to find life anywhere else in the solar system, it's likely to be on such an icy moon. The Europa Clipper mission seeks to determine whether Europa has a habitable surface in the vast ocean beneath its icy surface.
The UK space agency has invested £9 million in science instruments for another mission to the Jupiter system, which is due to explore the gas giant Esau's juice in 2031. The JUICE mission and Europa Clipper will work together to study Jupiter and its moons. .
“It's exciting to think that within the next decade we could have solid scientific evidence of the possibility of habitable worlds beyond our planet,” Harper said.
