NASA Planning Robotic Mission To Europa To Search for Life

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The Europa Clipper may be setting sail if NASA's latest plans go ahead.  The US space agency recently announced it was allocating funds to formulate a plan to robotically explore Jupiter's ice-covered moon.

The US space agency NASA, in its latest budget, has aside funds to robotically explore Jupiter’s moon Europa, often described as one of the solar system’s best bets for hosting alien life.

The agency's annual federal budget request of $17.5 billion (down by $1.2 billion from its 2010 peak) has set aside $15 million for “pre-formulation work” on a mission to the Jovian moon, with plans to make detailed observations and possibly sample its interior oceans.

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Scientists believe that underneath Europa’s icy exterior is a single, massive ocean that contains almost twice as much water as is found on Earth, kept liquid by the gravitational pull of Jupiter – a force that creates tidal swells 1,000 times stronger than those caused by our own Moon.

Discoveries of  diverse organisms including tube worms and shrimp found around the deep-sea hydrothermal vents known as ‘black smokers’ on Earth has led scientists to believe that sunlight may not be the prerequisite for life it was once thought to be.

Along with looking for life under the ice, observations made late last year by the Hubble telescope suggest that enormous jets of water some 200 kilometres tall (that’s twice as high as Earth’s atmosphere) are spurting from Europa’s southern pole.

This would mean that the Europa Clipper – a concept space probe that NASA been developing for just such a mission – could conceivably fly through these plumes of water vapor, collecting samples from Europa’s interior without having to face the cost and difficulty of landing on the surface.

NASA representatives stressed that all of this work is extremely preliminary.  The European Space Agency has also expressed much interest in Jupiter's moons.

"Europa is a very challenging mission operating in a really high radiation environment, and there's lots to do to prepare for it," the agency's chief financial officer Beth Robinson said to reporters on Tuesday. "We're looking for a launch some time in the mid-2020s.”

SOURCE  The Independent

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