Nasa is ready to send a spacecraft to an icy moon Jupiter where extraterrestrial life can eke out an existence in an enormous ocean hidden beneath its ice-covered surface.
The Europa Clipper mission is about to explode from Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Monday at 12:06 local time after the original plan to launch on Thursday was scrapped due to the gale force winds brought by Hurricane Milton.
Barring any further hitches, the six ton spacecraft – the largest Nasa ever built for a planetary mission – will fly past Mars and swing back around Earth before heading to Jupiter, covering nearly 2 billion miles before reaching its destination in 2030.
While the $5bn (£3.8bn) mission will not itself search for life on the icy Jovian moon, the probe’s suite of instruments will scour Europa’s surface for fingerprints of organic compounds and sniff for gases emitted from the moon to determine whether it is habitable. .
“This is a chance for us to explore not a world that might have been habitable billions of years ago, but a world that might be habitable today,” said Curt Niebur, a program scientist on the mission.
The spacecraft measures more than 100 feet from end to end, largely due to the super-sized solar panels needed to generate enough power for the probe’s electrical systems so far from the sun. It carries nine instruments, including cameras to map the moon’s surface and radar to peer beneath the moon’s thick ice cover.
Previous observations of Europa have revealed giant plumes of water spray from its icy surface, and tantalizing evidence for a 80 miles deep underground ocean which holds twice as much salt water as Earth under a 10 to 15 mile thick layer of ice. If life arose on the Jovian moon, which is similar to Earth’s moon, illuminating compounds may be lurking in the water that is spewed out.
Beyond the routine hazards of launch, the spacecraft faces extreme, and potentially computer-frying, levels of radiation once it begins its observations of Europa. Jupiter is surrounded by an enormous magnetic field that whips up charged particles and slams into Europa. The intense radiation bathes any spacecraft attempting to fly around the body.
For protection, Europa Clipper’s sensitive electronics are housed in an aluminum shielded vault, and instead of orbiting Europa itself, it will circle Jupiter, from where it will perform 49 looping flybys of the moon, one each few weeks
Despite limiting the amount of time the spacecraft spends in Europe’s most intense radiation field, each flyby, which will last less than a day, will still expose the probe to the equivalent radiation of 1m chest X-rays.
For all the damage it can cause, the radiation can produce fuel for life. If the high-energy particles split water molecules into oxygen and hydrogen in Europa’s thin atmosphere, some oxygen could reach the ocean and react with other chemicals to provide energy for alien microbes.
“If you think of all the water here on Earth, and then double it, that’s how much water we think could be on Europa,” said Dr Caroline Harper, the head of space science at the British Space Agency. “Water is essential to life as we know it, and if we’re going to find life elsewhere in the solar system, it’s most likely on an icy moon like this. The Europa Clipper mission will try to discover whether Europa is a habitable place that can support life in the vast ocean beneath its icy surface.”
The British Space Agency has invested £9 million in scientific instruments on another mission to the Jupiter system, Esa’s Juice probe, which will arrive at the gas giant in 2031. The Juice mission and Europa Clipper will work together to study Jupiter and its moons.
“It’s exciting to think that within the next decade we could have definitive scientific proof of the potential for habitable worlds beyond our planet,” Harper said.
