Europa 

NASA is asking scientists to think about what would be the best instruments to include on a mission to land on Jupiter’s icy moon, Europa. The space agency recently asked the science community to prepare for a planned competition to select science instruments for a potential Europa lander.

Even though a mission to land on the scientifically tantalizing Jovian moon Europa has not yet approved by the space agency, NASA's Planetary Science Division has funding this year to conduct the announcement of opportunity process.

"The possibility of placing a lander on the surface of this intriguing icy moon, touching and exploring a world that might harbor life is at the heart of the Europa lander mission."

“The possibility of placing a lander on the surface of this intriguing icy moon, touching and exploring a world that might harbor life is at the heart of the Europa lander mission,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. “We want the community to be prepared for this announcement of opportunity, because NASA recognizes the immense amount of work involved in preparing proposals for this potential future exploration.”

Image - NASA/JPL-Caltech

The formal community announcement provides advance notice of NASA’s plan to hold a competition for instrument investigations for a potential Europa lander mission. Proposed investigations will be evaluated and selected through a two-step competitive process to fund development of a variety of relevant instruments and then to ensure the instruments are compatible with the mission concept.

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Approximately 10 proposals may be selected to proceed into a competitive first phase. The Phase A concept study will be limited to approximately 12 months with a $1.5 million budget per investigation. At the conclusion of these studies, NASA may select some of these concepts to complete Phase A and subsequent mission phases.

NASA has stated the goals of the instruments should be:

1. to search for evidence of life on Europa
2. to assess the habitability of Europa via in situ techniques uniquely available to a lander mission
3. and to characterize surface and subsurface properties at the scale of the lander

Last year, in response to a congressional directive, NASA’s Planetary Science Division began a study to assess the science and engineering design of a future Europa lander mission. NASA routinely conducts such studies long before the start of any mission to gain an understanding of the challenges, feasibility and science value of the potential mission. The research team began work almost one year ago.

The proposed Europa lander is separate from and would follow its predecessor, the Europa Clipper multiple flyby mission – which now is in preliminary design phase and planned for launch in the early 2020s. Arriving in the Jupiter system after a journey of several years, the spacecraft would orbit the planet about every two weeks, providing opportunities for 40 to 45 flybys in the prime mission.

The Clipper spacecraft will image Europa’s icy surface at high resolution, and investigate its composition and structure of its interior and icy shell.

Of course, many of us remain quietly excited by the Europa missions, and have a secret wish for Arthur C. Clarke's science fiction vision to be at least a little bit on the mark.

SOURCE  NASA

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In a recent panel, NASA scientists said we may be 10 to 20 years away from finding life beyond Earth.  They are not talking about intelligent aliens, but confirmation of microbe life.

C ould there be life on other planets and moons? While widely believed to be the case, just based on the shear numbers of habitable bodies, we still have no authoritative answer. Now, NASA authorities say, we might soon be on the cusp of a definite answer.

"I believe we are going to have strong indications of life beyond Earth in the next decade and definitive evidence in the next 10 to 20 years," Ellen Stofan, chief scientist for NASA, said at a public panel earlier this week in Washington, as was reported in the Los Angeles Times.

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"It's definitely not an if, it's a when," said Jeffery Newmark, one of Stofan’s colleagues.

One of the reasons the organization is so sure: Water—thought to be vital for life, it keeps turning up in more places. Peering through telescopes, researchers have discovered it in space rocks, bodies smaller than planets like Ceres, monster mists in the middle of stars and on a large portion of the planets in our solar system.

"We are going to have strong indications of life beyond Earth in the next decade and definitive evidence in the next 10 to 20 years."

The findings suggest that previous ideas about where to find "habitable zones" may have been too limited. "We now recognize that habitable zones are not just around stars, they can be around giant planets too," Jim Green, director of planetary science at NASA said. "We are finding out the solar system is really a soggy place."

Scientists now widely accept that Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune all contain water in their inside and/or environments. There is likewise solid proof that  water is present on the five frosty moons of Jupiter and Saturn: Jupiter's Ganymede, Europa and Callisto, and Saturn's satellites Enceladus and Titan.

"We are not talking about little green men," Stofan said. "We are talking about little microbes."

Enceladus and Europa more likely than not have fluid seas that rest upon mineral-containing rocks, as based on the observations of spacecraft and telescopes, and both are geographically dynamic. These bodies have the three segments which astrobiologists believe are vital for the advancement of life: water, a source of energy (e.g., volcanic movement) and chemicals used as a part of biological processes, conceivably including nucleic acids.

Information from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has also recently shown that Ganymede most likely has a saltwater sea.

Scientists have also discovered water in the polar ice tops of Mars, and the planet likely once had a fluid sea. Ice has even been recorded on the moon and Mercury.



SOURCE  LA Times

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With a new budget windfall, NASA is setting aside funds to finally explore one of the most fascinating places in our Solar System—Jupiter’s ice covered moon, Europa.

Speaking at the Kennedy Space Center yesterday, NASA Administrator Charles Bolden announced the agency would be increasing its budget for another year. Bolden also explained that $100 million of the 18.5 billion dollars would go towards planning for a mission to Europa—Jupiter’s ice covered moon.

"Looking to the future, we’re planning a mission to explore Jupiter’s fascinating moon Europa."

The long-awaited news has been met with plenty of enthusiasm on social media.  Part of the reason for this is that Europa is one of the Solar System’s prime candidates for harboring extraterrestrial life.

Arthur C Clarke's famously used Europa in his 2010: Odyssey Two, where HAL states, "ALL THESE WORLDS ARE YOURS EXCEPT EUROPA ATTEMPT NO LANDING THERE."

Up until now, Europa remains largely unexplored.

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As one of Jupiter's 63 known satellites, Europa is only a little bit smaller than our own Moon, with a diameter of 3,120 km.

But what makes it really compelling to astrobiologists is that, beneath its icy surface lies a huge, liquid ocean, completely covering its rocky core. The European Space Agency has also expressed much interest in Jupiter's moons.

Hidden beneath Europa's icy surface is perhaps the most promising place in our solar system beyond Earth to look for present-day environments that are suitable for life. The Galileo mission found strong evidence that a subsurface ocean of salty water is in contact with a rocky seafloor.

The cycling of material between the ocean and ice shell could potentially provide sources of chemical energy that could sustain simple life forms.

"Looking to the future, we’re planning a mission to explore Jupiter’s fascinating moon Europa."-Bolden #StateOfNASA pic.twitter.com/v9L46zn4Up
— NASA (@NASA) February 2, 2015

While Bolden's statements about the Europa mission were brief (at the 27:07 mark of the video below), they are historic.

Bolden states that the agency will be selecting instruments this Spring, and moving to the next phase of the project. It is speculated that the mission might carry forward the Europa Clipper concept to development.

SOURCE  Discovery News

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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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