yes let’s go To find life on another world, Europe could be our best option. We think this icy moon of Jupiter has an ocean of water beneath its icy surface, and it looks like this ocean might have the right ingredients for life. If we can know for sure, it could be a game-changer in our quest to determine if we are alone.
“Europa is the first ocean world, other than Earth, that we discovered in our solar system,” says Jonathan Lunine, chief scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California. “We need to determine whether the ocean could support life.”
A mission to bring us that understanding is about to begin. Called the Europa Clipper, this NASA spacecraft, as tall as a giraffe and with solar panels as wide as a basketball court, will launch on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket this month or early next month. Its proposed release date of October 10 was pushed back due to Hurricane Milton, and will now be released no earlier than Sunday, October 13. After two decades of preparation, the $5.2 billion mission has a clear purpose: to discover whether Europe was ever, or still is, habitable. The goal is to discover if some of the elements essential for life, such as carbon and nitrogen, are present in that ocean, Lunine says. “How much salt is there and how much energy is available?”
About three hours after liftoff, 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 spacecraft will use the gravity of the Red Planet, and then Earth in 2026, to launch into the solar system. A problem with the spacecraft’s transistors had threatened the launch, and NASA was unsure whether they would survive Jupiter’s radiation, but in September it said the mission was okay move on. “There are no lingering concerns left,” Evans says.
The spacecraft will take almost six years to reach Jupiter in April 2030, a distance of about 2.9 billion kilometers, surpassing a European spacecraft. called JUICE in the process it is also en route to Jupiter to study its other icy moons, including Ganymede, the largest moon in the solar system. “Europe is the size of the Earth’s Moon,” says Lunine. “Ganymede is the size of Mercury.”
Jupiter has about 100 moons, but the four largest, the Galilean moons (Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto), are the most interesting. Io, which orbits closest to Jupiter, is hit by the planet’s intense radiation and gravity, making it the most volcanic body in the solar system. Ganymede, with its immense bulk, has its own magnetic field like the Earth. And Calisto, the most remote of the four, has a cratered surface which has remained unchanged for billions of years.