Europa Clipper mission to explore Jupiter moon for life, To begin the journey to Europa, one of Jupiter’s many moons, an imposing NASA probe will take off on Monday. It will take five-and-a-half years. This investigation will help discover if life can exist anywhere else in the solar system.
There is a possibility that under the icy surface of Europa, there could be an ocean of liquid water hidden beneath, which should be discovered by the US space agency’s Europa Clipper mission.
Nasa announced in a statement that the rocket will be launched by SpaceX Falcon Heavy from Cape Canaveral in Florida, on the “no earlier than” Monday, according to a statement from the company.
“Europe is one of the most promising destinations in the search for life beyond Earth,” Nasa official, Gina DiBraccio, said at a news conference held last month to discuss the search for life beyond Earth.
As a result of the mission, the search for signs of life will not be focused on finding these signs directly, but rather on answering the question: Does Europa have the ingredients that would allow life to exist there?
As soon as it does this, another mission would have to be launched to try and detect it if it does indeed occur.
In a statement to reporters earlier this month, Europa Clipper programme scientist Curt Niebur, explained that the mission’s purpose was not to explore planets that might have been habitable billions of years ago, like Mars, but rather to explore planets that might be habitable today, right now.
Its size is the largest probe that NASA has ever designed to explore interplanetary systems.
A full extension of the instrument’s huge solar panels, which are designed to capture the weak light that reaches Jupiter, will give the instrument a width of 30 metres.
There has been knowledge of Europa’s existence for over 600 years, but it was only in 1979 that the Voyager probes were able to take their first close-up images of its surface, which revealed mysterious reddish lines crisscrossing it.
Next came Nasa’s Galileo probe in the 1990s that made its way to Jupiter’s icy moon, finding it highly likely that it was the home of an ocean of some sort. This was the first probe to reach Jupiter’s frozen moon.
The Europa Clipper probe will be equipped with sophisticated instruments this time, including cameras, spectrographs, radars, and magnetometers to measure the planet’s magnetic field.
In addition to determining Europa’s icy surface structure, composition, and depth, the mission will look at its ocean salinity as well as how they interact to find out, for example, if water surfaces on Europa.
We are interested in understanding the presence of the three ingredients that make life possible: water, energy, and certain chemical compounds.
Bonnie Buratti, deputy project scientist for the mission, explained that if these conditions exist on Europa, primitive bacteria could live in the ocean.
However, the Europa Clipper may not be able to detect the bacteria because they are too deep.
Timenews1 provided that news.
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