Possible life on Jupiter's Moon? NASA spacecraft to investigate
PTC News Desk: Kennedy Space Center is all set to launch an aircraft towards Jupiter with the objective to hunt for signs of alien life on Europa which is one of the moons orbiting the distant planet. According to the previous studies, underneath the frozen crust of Jupiter's moon lies a huge salt-water ocean, which could possibly support life forms.
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"We're going on a 1.8-billion-mile journey to an ocean world - Jupiter moon, Europa!" the US space agency NASA said this morning on X ahead of the anticipated blast off.
NASA's flagship spacecraft 'Europa Clipper' mission, the largest spacecraft the US space agency developed for a planetary mission, was supposed to have launched earlier but got delayed due to Hurricane Milton, which swept through Florida on October 9-10.
Both the Clipper and the SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket were secured inside a SpaceX hanger near their launch pad at NASA's Kennedy Space Center, agency officials said on X.
The probe is billed to be around USD 5.2 million. After the launch, the spacecraft plans to fly by Mars in February 2025, and then back by Earth in December 2026, using the gravity of each planet to increase its momentum. With the help of these "gravity assists," Europa Clipper will achieve the velocity needed to reach Jupiter in April 2030.
Earlier on April 14, 2023, the European Space Agency had launched the Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (Juice) mission from Europe's Spaceport in French Guiana to study Jupiter and its three large ocean-bearing moons - Ganymede, Callisto and Europa. Juice, however, is expected to arrive at Jupiter only by July 2031.
The Europa Clipper spacecraft will have travelled 1.8 billion miles (2.9 billion kilometre) to reach Jupiter in April 2030. It will orbit Jupiter, and conduct 49 close flybys of Europa.
During these flybys, the spacecraft's nine science instruments will collect data on the moon's atmosphere, its ice crust, and the ocean underneath.
The nearly 10-feet-wide (3-meter) dish-shaped antenna and several smaller antennas will transmit the data to Earth, a trip that will take about 45 minutes when the spacecraft is in orbit around Jupiter, NASA said.
The antenna will operate on NASA's deep space X-band radio frequencies through the agency's Deep Space Network, a global array of large radio antennas that communicate with dozens of spacecraft throughout the solar system.
"Although Europa Clipper is not a life-detection mission, understanding Europa's habitability will help us better understand how life developed on Earth and whether we're likely to find conditions that might support life beyond our planet," the NASA stated.
Europa Clipper instruments include cameras, spectrometers, a magnetometer, and an ice-penetrating radar. These instruments will study Europa's icy shell, the ocean beneath, and the composition of the gases in the moon's atmosphere and surface geology, and provide insights into the moon's potential habitability.
The spacecraft will also be carrying a thermal instrument which will pinpoint the locations of warmer ice and the certain possible water vapour eruptions. Promising evidence suggests that the ocean beneath Europa's crust is twice the volume of all the Earth's oceans combined.
- With inputs from agencies
