NASA has awarded SpaceX a $178 million contract to launch Earth’s first-ever dedicated mission to explore Jupiter’s moon Europa, which has been a high-profile target for planetary scientists for many years now. Slated to launch in October 2024 from historic pad 39A at Kennedy Space Center in Florida, Europa Clipper will be the first spacecraft to study Europa up close since Galileo in the early 2000s, and will focus on determining the habitability of the moon’s global subsurface ocean, which is twice the size of Earth’s oceans combined & thought to be quite similar, but completely covered by a thick shell of ice.
NASA’s next mission back to Jupiter’s moon Europa just took another big step towards reality. The next phase of Europa Clipper has been confirmed, giving the go-ahead for the mission to proceed to final design, construction and testing.
For decades, Jupiter’s moon Europa has fascinated scientists and the public alike after it was learned that a global water ocean lies beneath the icy crust. Could there be life on this small world? Now, new results from old data, presented today in a NASA live science chat, are hinting that the subsurface environment on Europa might indeed be quite habitable, as other studies have also suggested. Previous observations indicated that there were plumes of water vapor erupting from below the surface into space, similar to ones on Saturn’s moon Enceladus. Confirmation was difficult, but a new study shows that the old Galileo probe to Jupiter in the late 1990s not only detected a plume, but actually flew through it, although that was unknown at the time.
The push for a return mission to Jupiter’s moon Europa has been gaining steam in the last few years, with NASA now planning for Europa Clipper, which would make repeated close flybys to study the moon’s interior ocean and the exciting potential for life. There has also been more talk about a possible lander to examine the moon’s surface up close. Such a mission would be expensive of course, but NASA is now studying possible ways to lessen the costs while maintaining good science return.
NASA’s upcoming James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) will be used to study two of the most fascinating moons in our Solar System – Europa and Enceladus, also known as “ocean worlds” since both have global oceans of water beneath their outer icy surfaces. The new observations will help scientists learn more about conditions on these worlds and guide the development of future robotic missions.
For decades now, Europa has beckoned – this moon of Jupiter which is frozen on the outside but hides a global ocean on the inside – has so far only been visited by spacecraft during brief flybys. Scientists and the public alike have been wanting to return to this fascinating little world since it offers the possibility of maybe, just maybe, being home to some kind of life. Plans have been inching forward for a new mission to conduct multiple, closer flybys of Europa, to learn more about the ocean just below the ice, but what about actually landing? A lander would be a more difficult prospect since Europa doesn’t have an atmosphere, but is certainly doable. Now, NASA has received a formal science report on how best to conduct such a mission. This is a significant step toward finally being able have the view of looking up at Jupiter hanging in the inky black Europan sky – a dream of many for a long time.
Intriguing new findings about Jupiter’s moon Europa were announced today by NASA, and while they don’t involve any direct evidence for life, they do provide more information on how scientists could better search for such evidence, without having to drill through the icy crust to the ocean below. The new observations, by the Hubble Space Telescope, have added to the evidence for active water vapor plumes on Europa—an exciting possibility, since they would possibly originate from the subsurface ocean, similar to the plumes on Saturn’s moon Enceladus. And just like the Cassini spacecraft has already done at Enceladus, those plumes—geysers really—could be sampled directly by a future spacecraft such as Europa Clipper.
For a long time now, there has been growing interest in sending a mission back to Jupiter to better study one moon in particular: Europa. Previous missions such as Voyager and Galileo showed us this world up close for the first time, revealing a place that maybe, just maybe, is home to some kind of life. On the outside, Europa is cold and frozen, like an airless version of Antarctica, with its surface completely composed of ice. But deeper down, as those probes found, there is a global ocean of water deeper than any oceans on Earth. In more recent years and months, a new NASA mission to Europa has finally started to take shape, with a launch tentatively scheduled for 2022. As often happens, however, the mission is facing possible budget cuts in 2017.
The recently announced new mission to Jupiter’s moon Europa, a highly anticipated return to this ocean world, may face a launch delay from 2022 to the late 2020s. The news comes amid the release yesterday of NASA’s fiscal year 2017 budget request, which provides substantially less funding than Congress had mandated last year.
This was an exciting and very important week for NASA and planetary exploration: the new NASA budget from Congress is better than expected and, in the words of The Planetary Society, “extraordinary.” There is a healthy increase for planetary science, and one new mission in particular which a lot of people have been waiting for: a new mission to Europa. Not only is it now fully funded, the Congressional plan goes further than the initial mission concept in calling for not just multiple flybys, but also a lander.
What lies under the ice, deep in Europa’s alien waters? This has been one of the most burning questions among planetary scientists and space enthusiasts alike, ever since NASA’s Galileo mission helped to establish during the late 1990s that Jupiter’s intriguing icy moon hosts a vast underground ocean of liquid water. Even though a definitive answer to this question is still several decades away, waiting for a future dedicated lander that will finally scoop up and study Europa’s icy sediments up-close, scientists have nevertheless made great progress in their understanding of the distant moon through the years by utilising some of the most advanced ground-based telescopes in operation today. A new study from a team of planetary scientists in the U.S. offers more credence to this hypothesis by showing that the moon’s famous surface “chaos terrain,” where the underground liquid ocean is thought to come into contact with the icy surface, features a distinct chemical composition that is unique on the entire moon, suggesting that it is composed of underground material that has risen to the surface. These regions on Europa offer a unique opportunity to study its internal makeup and can be considered as prime targets for a future robotic lander mission. Continue reading
After many years of people hoping and waiting, NASA has announced that a new mission to Europa has successfully completed its first major review by the agency and now is entering the development phase, known as formulation. In other words, we are finally going back to Europa!
Europa is considered one of the best places elsewhere in the Solar System to search for evidence of alien life, with its underground salt water ocean. With salt water, a rocky sea floor, and the energy and chemistry provided by tidal heating, Europa is thought to have the ingredients necessary for life of some kind. Whether there actually is anything alive there is, of course, the big question. Continue reading