If we go find life in another world, Europe may be our best choice. We believe there is an ocean of water beneath the frozen surface of Jupiter’s icy moon that may contain the ingredients necessary for life. If we find this out for sure, it could be a game-changer in our quest to figure out if we’re alone.
“Europa is the first ocean world that we have discovered in our solar system, apart from Earth,” says Jonathan Lunine, chief scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California. “We need to determine whether life can exist in the ocean.”
The mission to provide us with this understanding is now beginning. Called the Europa Clipper, NASA’s spacecraft – as lofty as a giraffe and equipped with solar panels as wide as a basketball court – will launch on a SpaceX Falcon Bulky rocket this month or early next month. The proposed release date is October 10 pushed away caused by Hurricane Milton, and will start no earlier than Sunday, October 13. Work on the project has been going on for two decades. $5.2 billion mission has one clear goal: to find out whether Europe was ever, or still is, habitable. The goal is to see if some of the basic elements of life, such as carbon and nitrogen, are present in the ocean, Lunine says. “How much salt is present and how much energy is available?”
About three hours after launch, the spacecraft will deploy its solar panels and begin its journey to Jupiter. “Four months later, we’re on Mars,” says JPL’s Jordan Evans, Clipper project manager. The probe will employ the gravity of the Red Planet and, in 2026, Earth to launch towards the solar system. A problem with the spacecraft’s transistors threatened the launch, and NASA was unsure whether they would survive Jupiter’s radiation, but in September stated that the mission would end ok, move on. “There are no lingering concerns,” Evans says.
The spacecraft will reach Jupiter in April 2030 from a distance of about 2.9 billion kilometers and will take almost six years, ahead of the European spacecraft called JUICE in the process, which is also on its way to Jupiter to study its other icy moons, including Ganymede, the solar system’s largest moon. “Europa is the size of Earth’s moon,” Lunine says. “Ganymede is the size of Mercury.”
Jupiter has about 100 moons, but the most captivating are its four largest, the Galilean moons – Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto. Io, orbiting closest to Jupiter, is subjected to the planet’s intense radiation and gravity, making it the most volcanic body in the solar system. Ganymede, with its enormous mass, has its own magnetic field like Earth’s. And Callisto, the most distant of the four, has strongly cratered surface that have not changed for billions of years.