i left SpaceshipA huge Falcon Heavy rocket from SpaceX flew to one of the satellites planet the buyerto find elements or any form of life, in a projected ocean of liquid water under an ice sheet.
The mission was called “Europa Clipper“, after Jupiter’s moon Europa, and the vehicle is expected to arrive in April 2030.
NASA has never looked so closely at Europa, which scientists believe has an ocean beneath its icy surface. Water Questioner.
“The moon Europa is one of the most promising places to find life outside of Earth,” NASA official Gina DiBraccio said at a press conference.
The mission will not find signs of life directly, but will answer whether “Europe” is habitable, that is, the possibility that there are the ingredients that make life possible there.
If so, another mission will have to go to him to try to find those signals.
The mission’s scientific director, Kurt Niebuhr, said: “It’s an opportunity for us to study not a world that might have lived billions of years ago, like Mars, but a world that might have existed today.
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Europa Clipper is the largest probe ever designed by NASA to explore the planets, as it is 30 meters wide once its large solar panels are open, designed to capture faint light that reaches Jupiter.
The first close-up pictures of Europa, known to exist since the year 161, were taken by the Voyager probes in 1979, revealing the mysterious red lines on the surface.
This time, Europa Clipper was equipped with a large number of very advanced instruments, including cameras, spectrometer, radar, and magnetometer.
The mission is expected to determine the structure and composition of Europa’s icy surface, the depth of its ocean and even its salinity, and how the two interact to determine, for example, whether water rise to the surface in some places.
All this to understand if it includes the three essential parts of life, namely water, energy and some chemical compounds.
Bonnie Buratti, the mission’s deputy scientific director, said that if these components were present on Europa, there would be life around it in the form of primitive bacteria, but they were at such a depth that Europa would not be able to. Make a clipper. find them.
The probe will travel 2.9 billion kilometers within five and a half years to reach Jupiter, and when it arrives, the main mission will continue for four years.
The probe will make 49 close flybys over Europa, at an altitude of up to 25 kilometers from the surface, and will be subjected to intense radiation, equivalent to several million chest X-ray images in each flyby.
