NASA's Europa mission takes another step toward reality
NASA's current plan for exploring Europa has just passed its first major review, proving that it's feasible, unlike any of the previous ideas the agency's scientists cooked up. America's space agency has been developing mission ideas for Jupiter's moon for years and even considered sending a lander to the satellite as recently as a year ago. Its scientists also once thought of sending a spacecraft to orbit Europa, but they ended up having to scrap that plan: the moon is bathed in Jupiter's radiation, which would quickly kill any vessel that's constantly exposed to it. So, instead of a lander or a Europa orbiter, NASA will send out a spacecraft in the 2020s designed to orbit Jupiter itself.
As the agency revealed in May, that spacecraft will be equipped with nine imaging, radar, magnenometry and spectometry tools to study the moon's ice crust and the subsurface ocean that's likely underneath it. The vehicle will fly by Europa 45 times during its mission period, and it will use every chance it gets to know more about the natural satellite. It'll even be equipped to gather liquid/gas samples, in case the moon really does erupt plumes of water into space. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory has been studying the mission formally known as the Clipper concept since 2011, with help from the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL). Now, that concept is ready to enter development phase, and if all goes well, we'll finally know if there's life on Jupiter's moon.
