NASA gets funding to visit Jupiter's moon Europa for possible signs of life

NASA is excited this week to have been given the green light in next year’s budget from the White House to go ahead with developing a robotic mission to Jupiter’s mysterious moon Europa.

Similar in size to Earth’s Moon, Europa is thought to harbour a global-wide, salty ocean beneath an ice shell that is up to 100 km thick. NASA’s Galileo spacecraft, which orbited the gas giant Jupiter and its moons nearly twenty years ago, made the discovery using radar echoes. Since then, the ice-cracked moon has been one of the primary targets in the solar system in their search for life beyond Earth.

The mission NASA plans to launch in the early 2020s is called the Europa Clipper and is a sophisticated spacecraft that will circle Jupiter for three years, barnstorming the moon at least 45 times. Hopes are that on-board instruments will be able to get details of the orb’s surface with a resolution down to less than a meter across.

One of the main surface features the Clipper mission may finally help resolve are the many reddish vein-like cracks that criss-cross the moon. Could they be filled with organic compounds? Also, the Hubble Space Telescope recently discovered water vapour erupting in large plumes around its southern polar region. How deep are the sources of these eruptions, and could these geysers venting into space be somehow connected to a sub-surface ocean?

But the European Space Agency may beat NASA to the punch with their Europa mission, called JUICE for Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer, which is set to launch in 2022. Their probe will explore Jupiter and three of its largest moons: Ganymede, Callisto, and Europa.

Depending on what Clipper and JUICE find, this may just the prelude because the ultimate goal is for a future mission to land a robotic spacecraft on the surface of Europa to investigate its potential to support life. On the drawing board is a lander that could drill through the thinner regions of ice associated with these vents and fissures and lower a robotic submersible that could investigate the hidden ocean for possible life.

NASA has already taken the next step for this bold future mission by commissioning a team of scientists to investigate the icy shell of Europa and its potential to hold life in that sub-surface ocean. Their findings were published just over a year ago, and there is no doubt among the scientific community that the potentials are definitely there for great discoveries.

“Landing on Europa and touching its surface is a visionary goal of planetary science,” said Robert Pappalardo of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in a press statement at the time.

“This is a difficult technical challenge that is probably many years away. Understanding the key scientific questions to be addressed by a future Europa lander helps us to focus on the technologies required to get us there, and on the necessary data that might be attained by a precursor mission that could scout out landing sites. Europa is the most likely place in our solar system beyond Earth to have life today, and a lander mission would be the best way to search for signs of life.”

“Landing on the surface of Europa is a key step in the astrobiological investigation of that world,” said Christopher McKay, a leading astro-biology scientist at NASA Ames Research Center.

“The hope would be that surface materials, possibly near the linear crack features, include biomarkers carried up from the ocean.”