After several days of delay due to the violent Hurricane Milton, NASA this Monday launched Europa Clipper, a $5.2 billion mission, to Europa, Jupiter’s fourth largest moon. The probe, the size of a basketball court, took off punctually at 6:06 p.m. Spanish peninsular time aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket from Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. (USA.). Their goal is to fly over the Jovian satellite dozens of times to find out if it can be habitable.
On the outside, Europa looks like a marble covered in frost, but scientists suspect that beneath its frozen crust lies an immense liquid ocean of salt water, so large that it could contain twice as much water as all of Earth’s oceans combined. Furthermore, this world appears to possess some of the essential ingredients for life such as carbonhydrogen, nitrogen or phosphorus. These conditions make it one of the most promising places in our solar system for the search for life beyond Earth.
“Europa Clipper will not search for life directly, but will try to characterize the habitability of the moon,” emphasizes Olga Prieto Ballesteros, researcher at the Astrobiology Center (CAB-CSIC-INTA). «The interesting thing about Europa compared to other icy satellites of Jupiter such as Ganymede is that the water ocean is currently in contact with the rock mantle, which can have geothermal activity, and that interaction can allow carbon, phosphorus or sulfur to exist and that chemical reactions occur that help possible microorganisms obtain energy,” he explains. On Ganymede, on the other hand, liquid water appears enclosed between two layers of ice. Enceladus, Saturn’s moon, may have activity similar to that of Europa and the European Space Agency (ESA) plans to send a mission there starting in 2030.
While the interior of Europe is so promising, its surface is a hellish place. There, the extreme temperature, about 180ºC below zero, and the radiation from Jupiter make it impossible for the organic matter not to deteriorate in a short time. Avoiding strong radiation is one of the reasons Clipper will not orbit Europa, but will instead perform 49 rapid flybys at altitudes of up to 25 km as it orbits Jupiter. Each flyby will be unique, because it will be carried out over a different place to explore almost the entire moon. During those approaches, the probe will launch its nine scientific instruments on board, including cameras, spectrometers and an ice-penetrating radar to search for groundwater, all protected in a titanium and aluminum vault.
Radiation is also one of the reasons the ship is so massive. And beyond the extraordinary mission for which it has been built, Europa Clipper is a spectacle in itself: it weighs more than 3,200 kilos without fuel, measures about 5 meters high and reaches 30.5 meters long, the size of a basketball court, with its solar panels extended. You’ll need them for power while operating in the Jupiter system, five times farther from the Sun than Earth.
Defective transistors
Europa Clipper It will have to face a number of challenges during its 2.9 billion kilometer journey to reach its destination in April 2030, but it has overcome the first on land. Possibly faulty transistors installed in the more than $5 billion probe raised fears of a major delay a few weeks ago. By the way, the name of the mission refers to the clipper ships, very fast three-masted sailing ships that in the 19th century traveled the oceans transporting tea and other goods.
NASA’s mission is not the only one interested in the Jovian moon. In April 2023 the European Space Agency (ESA) shipment to the Jupiter system Juice mission (Jupiter’s Icy Moon Explorer) to find out if Europa and its two other large moons, Ganymede and Callisto, harbor habitable oceans beneath their surface. After a long journey of eight years, Juice will be the first to orbit a moon other than ours (Ganymede). The probe, weighing six tons and built by the Airbus company in Toulouse (France), has a dozen scientific instruments on board.
Europa Clipper and Juice are “complementary” missions, says the director of the CAB Planetology and Habitability department. «At the time, NASA and ESA considered sending them at the same time, as a joint mission with two orbiters – the one from the US agency focused on Europe, and the one from the European one, on Ganymede. In the end, it couldn’t be, but even so the two missions are going to overlap, so the synergies between them are discussed: how each one is going to provide information about the same thing from a different angle.
If the results in Europe are promising, we should consider studying the habitable environment in situ, starting by sending a future mission landing. It won’t be easy at all. “First a lander will be sent to the surface and then an attempt will be made to reach the place that is assumed to be potentially habitable, for which it is necessary to cross the ice crust to reach the ocean with a submarine, but this technology still needs to be developed,” says Prieto Ballesteros.
Therefore, one of Clipper’s objectives is to determine the thickness of the ice crust, which could be 10 or 20 km, to know where it is thinner and may have easier access to the underground ocean. «Perhaps an area can be found where the crust is thinner and an isolated reservoir can be accessed that keeps the water liquid. More technological studies must be carried out to see how this can be done, for example, melting the ice as the probe advances. It must be taken into account that this probe will have to communicate and cannot be trapped under the ice,” says the researcher. To find out how that submarine will move under the ice, Clipper will also try to report on the composition of the ocean. All in case one day we can send the first submarine to another world.
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