The discovery of life beyond Earth would have profound implications for our understanding of the Universe and our place within it. The search for such life begins by identifying potential habitable environments within our Solar System. These environments must have liquid water, an abundance of the chemical elements necessary to build the molecules of life, and a source of energy that life can utilize. These environments must also be geologically stable enough for life to have sufficient time to emerge. Jupiter’s moon, Europa, is one of the most promising locations for such a habitable environment. There, a vast liquid water ocean hides beneath the moon’s icy exterior, a rock interior provides the critical elemental ingredients, chemotrophic reactions provide energy for life, and Jupiter-driven daily tides warm the interior and sustains the ocean.
To better understand Europa’s potential habitability, this October NASA is launching the Europa Clipper mission, which will enter orbit around Jupiter in 2030 and flyby Europa nearly fifty times over the course of four years. Europa Clipper is outfitted with an array of instruments designed to work in coordination to characterize the nature of the moon’s icy shell and the ocean beneath it. The ice shell will be investigated by a suite of remote sensing instruments, including two visible-light cameras to take pictures of the surface, an infrared-light camera to determine surface composition, a temperature-sensitive camera to look for warm regions on the surface and determine its physical properties, and a RADAR system that can see into the interior of the ice to better understand its structure and search for hidden pockets of liquid water.
The Europa Clipper spacecraft in a cleanroom facility at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. In this view, the massive solar panels have not yet been installed. The large circular high-gain antenna at right is 10 ft across. Most of the spacecraft is covered by silver insulating blankets.
Although we cannot sample the ocean directly, the Europa Clipper mission also carries a magnetometer and plasma instrument to measure the magnetic fields the ocean generates. An ultra-violet camera will search for plumes emanating from Europa’s interior, and a mass spectrometer and dust analyzer will measure the composition of material ejected from Europa’s surface. Gravity measurements will help determine Europa’s deeper interior structure. Each instrument provides an important piece to the complex puzzle that must be put together to determine whether Europa’s interior is conducive to the development and sustainability of life.
Enhanced color image of Europa made from images (near-infrared, green, and violet filters) taken by the Galileo spacecraft in 1995 and 1998. The image scale is approximately 1 mile per pixel (1.6 km/pixel) and north is at right. Image courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech/SETI Institute.
Designing the Europa Clipper spacecraft and its instruments, and planning how they will acquire data at Europa, has been an international effort, including the participation of scientists from the U.S. Geological Survey’s Flagstaff-based Astrogeology Science Center. Our role has been to plan how the visible-light cameras will take images of Europa’s surface, and to write the software that will process the data into images that can be used by scientists and enjoyed by the public. In this presentation, I will summarize our current understanding of Europa, describe the questions that the Europa Clipper seeks to answer, and discuss Flagstaff’s role in this once-in-a-lifetime mission to search for a new habitable world.
Board member, Adam Marsh, and lead paleontologist at Petrified National Forest, works with a team of scientists to uncover an approximately 300 million-year-old fossil skeleton discovered at Canyonlands National Park in Utah (June 2024)