Does Europe contain the ingredients that would allow life to be present?
Is there anywhere else in our solar system that could support life? A massive NASA probe is set to blast off Monday on a five-and-a-half-year journey to Europa, one of Jupiter’s many moons, to take the first detailed step toward discovery.
The Europa Clipper mission will allow the US space agency to discover new details about the Moon, which scientists believe could harbor an ocean of liquid water beneath its icy surface.
Liftoff is scheduled “at the earliest” on Monday, October 14 from Cape Canaveral in Florida aboard a powerful SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket, NASA said in a press release.
“Europe is one of the most promising places to search for life beyond Earth,” NASA official Gina DiBraccio said at a news conference last month.
The mission will not directly look for signs of life but will instead seek to answer the question: Does Europe contain the ingredients that would allow life to be present?
If this is the case, then another mission will have to make the trip to try to detect it.
“This is a chance for us to explore not a world that might have been habitable billions of years ago,” like Mars, Europa Clipper program scientist Curt Niebur told reporters last month. “but a world that could be habitable today, right now.”
The probe is the largest ever designed by NASA for interplanetary exploration.
It measures 30 meters wide when its huge solar panels, designed to capture the faint light that reaches Jupiter, are fully deployed.
Graphic showing the interior layers of Jupiter’s presumed oceanic moon Europa, which will be studied by NASA’s Europa Clipper probe.
Primitive life?
Although the existence of Europa has been known since 1610, the first close-up images were taken by the Voyager probes in 1979, which revealed mysterious reddish lines crisscrossing its surface.
The next probe to reach Jupiter’s icy moon was NASA’s Galileo probe in the 1990s, which revealed that it was very likely that the moon harbored an ocean.
This time, the Europa Clipper probe will carry a host of sophisticated instruments, including cameras, a spectrograph, radar and a magnetometer to measure its magnetic forces.
The mission will seek to determine the structure and composition of Europa’s icy surface, its depth and even the salinity of its ocean, as well as how the two interact – to find out, for example, whether water is rising on the surface in places. .
The goal is to understand whether the three ingredients necessary for life are present: water, energy and certain chemical compounds.
If these conditions exist on Europa, life could be found in the ocean in the form of primitive bacteria, explained Bonnie Buratti, the mission’s deputy project scientist.
But the bacteria would probably be too deep for the Europa Clipper to see.
What if Europe was ultimately not habitable? “It also raises a whole series of questions: Why did we think that? And why isn’t that there?” said Nikki Fox, associate administrator at NASA.
The probe is the largest ever designed by NASA for interplanetary exploration.
49 flyovers
The probe will travel 2.9 billion kilometers (1.8 billion miles) on its journey to Jupiter, with an expected arrival in April 2030.
The main mission will last another four years.
The probe will make 49 close flybys of Europa, up to 25 kilometers (16 miles) above the surface.
He will be subjected to intense radiation, the equivalent of several million chest x-rays each time.
Some 4,000 people have been working on the $5.2 billion mission for about a decade.
NASA says the investment is justified by the importance of the data that will be collected.
If our solar system turns out to be home to two habitable worlds (Europa and Earth), “think about what that means when you extend that result to the billions and billions of other solar systems in this galaxy,” said Europa’s Niebur Clipper. program scientist.
“Putting aside the “Is there life?” “question on Europa, the question of habitability itself opens up a huge new paradigm for the search for life in the galaxy,” he added.
The Europa Clipper will operate at the same time as the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Juice probe, which will study two other moons of Jupiter: Ganymede and Callisto.
© 2024 AFP
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