This is amazing news: NASA is sending a mission to Europa! If everything goes well, a robotic submarine may be landing on Jupiter’s moon—the world that scientists believe is the most likely to contain life in the Solar System—by 2030, a real space odyssey. This has the potential to change the world.
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For the first time ever, the Hubble Space Telescope has observed water plumes on the icy crust of Europa. The Jovian moon is one of the most likely worlds to contain life in the Solar System. According to Lorenz Roth—who headed the team that made the discovery—"this is tremendously exciting." No kidding.
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With potential oceans flowing below its icy surface, NASA thinks Jupiter’s Europa moon is promising candidate to harbor organic life. As such, the space agency and its JPL laboratory are looking to send a lander there within a decade, and have detailed what it wants it to explore in a new paper. Key goals include measuring the organic content of surface and near-surface chemistry, exploring mineralogy, measuring the thickness and salinity of the oceans and ice, imaging surface formations and looking at microscopic ice and non-ice grains. Researchers also looked at potential landing sites, and were torn between a more interesting, active site like “Thera Macula” and a more stable location with ancient geology. NASA’s Juno mission, launched in August 2011, is expected to help settle such issues when it probes Europa from orbit starting in 2016. Though it’d be hard to top Curiosity’s setdown, a Europa landing could be even more dramatic, considering the moon is over 10 times farther away than Mars and never gets above minus 370 degrees Fahrenheit.
Via: The Register
Source: NASA (paper)
NASA’s Europa Jupiter System Mission, set for 2026, will be the first survey Jupiter’s frozen moon. Scientists also plan to explore the moon’s liquid oceans, which are buried under 6km of ice. Getting through that will be tough. But once we hit water, Eurpoa’s interior will be explored by the most advanced autonomous underwater vehicle ever built. More »
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