Europa Clipper mission to 'one of the most promising places to look for life beyond Earth' set for lift-off
- by Australian Broadcasting Corporation
- Oct 14, 2024
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Near-infrared images of Jupiter's fourth-largest moon suggest carbon can be found in its vast subsurface ocean.
The five-and-a-half-year-long Clipper mission will allow the US space agency to uncover new details about the Jupiter-orbiting moon Europa — which scientists believe could hold an ocean of liquid water beneath its icy surface.
"Europa is one of the most promising places to look for life beyond Earth," NASA official Gina DiBraccio said at a news conference last month.
The mission will not look directly for signs of life but will instead look to answer the question: Does Europa contain the ingredients that would allow it to thrive?
If it does, another mission would then have to make the journey to try and detect it.
"It's a chance for us to explore not a world that might have been habitable billions of years ago," Europa Clipper program scientist Curt Niebur told reporters last month, "but a world that might be habitable today, right now."
Largest NASA probe for planetary exploration
In this artist's concept, the Europa Clipper is seen over Europa with Jupiter in the distance.
(Supplied: NASA/JPL-Caltech
)Europa has been known to scientists since 1610 and was first photographed by Voyager probes in 1979.
The images revealed mysterious reddish lines crisscrossing the moon's surface.
The next probe to reach Jupiter's icy moon was NASA's Galileo probe in the 1990s, which found it was highly likely that the moon was home to an ocean.
This time, the Europa Clipper probe will carry a host of sophisticated instruments, including cameras, a spectrograph, radar and a magnetometer to measure its magnetic forces.
The probe is the largest ever designed by NASA for interplanetary exploration.
It is 30 metres wide when its immense solar panels — designed to capture the weak light that reaches Jupiter — are fully extended.
Europa arrival expected April 2030
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The probe will travel 2.9 billion kilometres on its journey to Jupiter, with arrival expected in April 2030.
The main mission will then last another four years.
The probe will make 49 close flybys over Europa, coming as close as 25 kilometres above the surface.
Juice successfully launches for Jupiter
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