If you go To find life on another world, Europa may be your best bet. Jupiter’s icy moons have oceans of water beneath their frozen surfaces, which are thought to contain the right ingredients for life. If we could know that for sure, it could be a game-changer in the quest to determine whether we are alone.
“Europa is the first oceanic world other than Earth that we discovered in our solar system,” says Jonathan Lunin, chief scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California. “We need to determine whether the ocean can support life.”
The mission to bring us that understanding is about to begin. The NASA spacecraft, called Europa Clipper, is as tall as a giraffe and has solar panels as wide as a basketball court, and will launch on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket this month or early next year. The proposed release date was October 10th. pushed back Due to Hurricane Milton, the launch will take place by Sunday, October 13th. $5.2 billion mission We have one clear purpose. The goal is to find out whether Europa was once habitable or is still habitable. The goal is to find out whether some of the essential elements for life, such as carbon and nitrogen, are present in the ocean, Lunin said. “How much salt is present and how much energy is available?”
Approximately three hours after liftoff, the spacecraft will deploy its solar panels and begin its journey to Jupiter. “Four months later, we’re already on Mars,” says JPL’s Jordan Evans, Clipper’s project manager. The spacecraft will use Mars’ gravity and, in 2026, Earth’s gravity to blast off into the solar system. Problems with the spacecraft’s transistors threatened its launch, and NASA was unsure if it could withstand Jupiter’s radiation, but in September it announced the mission was in trouble. It’s okay to move on. “There’s no lingering concern,” Evans said.
The spacecraft will take almost six years to reach Jupiter, some 1.8 billion miles (2.9 billion kilometers) away, in April 2030, overtaking European spacecraft. called juice Along the way, it is also on its way to Jupiter to study other icy moons, including Ganymede, the solar system’s largest moon. “Europa is about the same size as Earth’s moon,” Lunine says. “Ganymede is about the size of Mercury.”
Jupiter has about 100 moons, but the most interesting are its four largest Galilean moons: Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto. Io, which orbits closest to Jupiter, is influenced by Jupiter’s intense radiation and gravity, making it the object with the most volcanic bodies in the solar system. Ganymede, due to its huge volume, has its own magnetic field, similar to Earth. And to Callisto, the farthest of the four; heavily cratered surface It hasn’t changed in billions of years.
