NASA could find alien life by 2030 on Jupiter’s moon, new study claims

NASA could confirm alien life in 2030 when it launches its $178 million craft to Jupiter’s moon, scientists have revealed.

The US space agency is set to launch its Europa Clipper in October for its five-and-a-half trip to Europa, where it will spend four years investigating the icy moon.

Now, a new study has analyzed instruments aboard the craft and found that they are capable of picking up a single living cell in a tiny grain of ice ejected from the moon’s oceans.

A team of researcher led by The University of Washington determined the tools can detect microbes in one out of hundreds of thousands of ice grains – and identify chemicals that are key components of life on Earth.

Lead author Fabian Klenner said: ‘For the first time, we have shown that even a small fraction of cellular material could be identified by a mass spectrometer on board a spacecraft.

‘Our results give us more confidence that, with the help of future instruments, we will be able to detect life forms similar to those on Earth, which we increasingly believe may be present on oceanic moons.’

NASA chose to study Europa because it is abundant with water and specific nutrients — all of which could mean the moon supports life.

Scientists have previously determined that for a planet to have life, it must have three main ingredients: temperatures that allow liquid water to exist; the presence of carbon-based molecules; and an energy input, such as sunlight.

And Europe seems to have them all.

A total of five spacecraft have visited the distant planetary body, but Clipper will contain the most powerful instruments of any previous mission – and was developed with the goal of searching for life.

The new study focused on a common bacteria found called Sphingopyxis alaskensis, which is found in waters off the coast of Alaska.

Scientists chose this specimen because of its slimmer nature than most modeled organisms and its ability to survive in cold, nutrient-poor environments — similar characteristics to what life would encounter on Europa.

“They are extremely small, so they are theoretically able to fit into ice grains emitted from an ocean world like Enceladus or Europa,” Klenner said.

The simulation included a scenario of Clipper’s SUrface Dust Analyzer (SUDA), which will scoop up the adopted ice grains and identify their chemistry.

‘SUDA is uniquely able to detect salts in the dust/ice grains. The speed and direction of the grains will tell SUDA their origin on Europa’s surface,’ NASA shared in a statement.

The instrument will also be able to detect negatively charged ions, allowing it to pick up fatty acids and lipids.

“To me, looking for lipids or fatty acids is even more exciting than looking for the building blocks of DNA, and the reason is that fatty acids seem to be more stable,” Klenner said.

Senior author Frank Postberg, professor of planetary sciences at the Freie Universität Berlin, said: ‘With appropriate instrumentation, such as the SUrface Dust Analyzer on NASA’s Europa Clipper spacecraft, it may be easier than we thought to find life, or traces of it, on ice moons.

‘If life is present there, of course, and bothers to be encased in ice grains originating from an environment such as an underground water reservoir.’

Europa has a diameter of 1,940 miles—about 90 percent of the diameter of Earth’s moon.

Clipper’s main body is a giant 10-foot-tall propulsion module designed and constructed by the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland.

The spacecraft will launch on a Falcon Heavy rocket owned by Musk’s company from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.