Credit: Kevin Gill from Nashua, NH, United States, CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons
If life exists anywhere else in the solar system, it is most likely in the seas of Jupiter’s icy moon Europa.
The mysterious world seems to contain elements essential to life as we know it. Beneath its frozen exterior lies a body of water so deep that it may hold more liquid than all of Earth’s oceans. Europa is believed to have enough carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen and other important elements to form the building blocks of living organisms. And scientists suspect the heat produced as the moon is stretched and compressed by Jupiter’s gravity would provide enough energy to sustain the life of any creatures that might reside there.
That’s why NASA built the Europa Clipper.
The spacecraft will lift off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida a year from now and reach its destination in 2030. Once there, it will make dozens of flybys so that nine special instruments can learn more about Europa’s geology and determine whether Europa is indeed environmentally friendly. to live.
“The ocean makes it one of the best places to look for habitability,” said Cynthia Phillips, a planetary geologist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge and staff project scientist for the $5 billion Europa Clipper mission.
But there’s one major catch: Jupiter is home to the harshest radiation belts in the solar system. The radiation exposure is so high that someone visiting Europa would receive a lethal dose within hours, according to the European Space Agency. Europa’s delicate instruments are slightly louder than humans’, but not overly powerful.
That’s why NASA scientists and engineers designed a complicated flight path for the spacecraft, with an elliptical orbit that would keep it as safe a distance from Jupiter’s radiation belts as possible. Only a day or two of Europa Clipper’s two to three week orbit will be spent in the zone of the most intense radiation, collecting a variety of data before retreating to recover it.
“On every flyby, it was like holding my breath,” Phillips said. The spacecraft “will take a deep breath, go in and take all the images and observations, then get out of there.” Then there will be a week or two to recover while scientists return to Earth to examine the data and come up with new commands for the next flight, he said.
The goal is to make 45 runs over 2½ years, within 16 miles of Europa’s surface. At that distance, the Clipper’s magnetometer will be able to measure the depth and salinity of the lunar ocean; its mass spectrometer will study the chemical makeup of the ocean; and its ultraviolet spectrograph will look for plumes of water vapor escaping through the ice shell.
But fast flybys alone are not enough to protect the spacecraft’s instrument suite from Jupiter’s harsh radiation environment. So they will be encased in a specially made aluminum shield about 1 centimeter thick.
Being bombarded with the high-energy particles that make up Jupiter’s radiation belts is like sitting under an aluminum roof in the middle of a hailstorm—it might protect you for a while, but it will eventually take too much damage to do its job.
So JPL engineers didn’t try to make armor to deflect radiation. Instead, they developed materials that absorb particles hurtling toward the spacecraft and divert them away from its sensitive interior, protecting the instruments and any data they collect, said Insoo Jun, co-chair of the Clipper Radiation Focus Group and a member of the Europa Clipper science team.
Scientists have wanted to see Europa up close since the early 1970s, when images from the telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory in Tucson revealed that the moon’s surface was made of water ice. Visits by NASA’s Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 spacecraft in 1979 showed that the moon was active, and the Galileo mission in 1995 confirmed that Europa had a subsurface ocean, as predicted by some scientific models.
Speculation about the potential for life on Europa also got a boost from a discovery on Earth—an unexpected array of organisms living near magma-fueled hydrothermal vents on the ocean floor.
The data Europa Clipper collects will help scientists determine whether the icy moon is truly the prime exobiology candidate they suspect.
“This mission is full of challenges,” Phillips said. “Europe is key to understanding not only the habitability of our solar system, but also potentially expanding the definition of a habitable zone.”
Traditionally, the habitable zone is thought to be the region around a star where a planet gets just the right amount of energy to keep liquid water on its surface. Europa is too far away to get that energy from the Sun, but perhaps Jupiter’s gravitational push and pull could provide it.
“If there is a habitable environment on Europa,” Phillips said, “this would have a major impact on the possibility of life in the cosmos.”
Los Angeles Time 2023.
Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
Quotation: How NASA’s Europa Clipper will survive its journey to Jupiter’s enemy moon (2023, October 18) retrieved October 19, 2023 from
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2023-10-19 12:09:53
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