If you go To find life on another world, Europa may be your best bet. Jupiter’s icy moons have oceans of water beneath their frozen surfaces, which are thought to contain the right ingredients for life. If we could know that for sure, it could be a game-changer in the quest to determine whether we are alone.
“Europa is the first oceanic world other than Earth that we discovered in our solar system,” says Jonathan Lunin, chief scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California. “We need to determine whether the ocean can support life.”
The mission to bring us that understanding is about to begin. The NASA spacecraft, called Europa Clipper, is as tall as a giraffe and has solar panels as wide as a basketball court, and is scheduled to launch on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket this month or early next year. The scheduled launch date of October 10th was postponed due to Hurricane Milton, and the launch date was now set to be Sunday, October 13th. This 20-year, $5.2 billion mission has one clear objective: The purpose is to find out whether Europa ever existed. Or is it still habitable? The goal is to find out whether some of the essential elements for life, such as carbon and nitrogen, are present in the ocean, Lunin said. “How much salt is present and how much energy is available?”
Approximately three hours after liftoff, the spacecraft will deploy its solar panels and begin its journey to Jupiter. “Four months later, we’re already on Mars,” says JPL’s Jordan Evans, Clipper’s project manager. The spacecraft will use Mars’ gravity and, in 2026, Earth’s gravity to blast off into the solar system. There was a problem with the spacecraft’s transistors, and NASA was unsure if it would be able to withstand Jupiter’s radiation, so the launch was at risk, but in September the mission announced it was safe to continue. “There’s no lingering concern,” Evans said.
The spacecraft will take almost six years to reach Jupiter, about 1.8 billion miles (2.9 billion kilometers) away, in April 2030, and will be joined by JUICE, which is also on its way to Jupiter to study other icy moons. It will overtake a European spacecraft called . , including Ganymede, the solar system’s largest moon. “Europa is about the same size as Earth’s moon,” Lunine says. “Ganymede is about the size of Mercury.”
Jupiter has about 100 moons, but the most interesting are its four largest Galilean moons: Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto. Io, which orbits closest to Jupiter, is affected by Jupiter’s intense radiation and gravity, making it the object with the most volcanic bodies in the solar system. Ganymede, due to its huge volume, has its own magnetic field, similar to Earth. And Callisto, the most remote of the four, has a cratered surface that has remained unchanged for billions of years.
(Tag Translation) Science
