Space
NASA mission will study habitability of Jupiter's moon
Treated as one of the American space agency's flagship missions, it cost US$5.2 billion - expensive even by the standards of this type of mission (Perseverance, for example, cost US$2.75 billion).
NASA expects to launch this Monday (14) its most important interplanetary robotic mission since the departure of the Mars rover Perseverance in 2020. The Europa Clipper mission will aim to determine the potential habitability of the most famous and intriguing of Jupiter's moons, Europe.
To be launched now by a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, it will only reach the vicinity of Jupiter in April 2030. Along the way, the spacecraft will fly over Mars (in February 2025 ) and Earth (in December 2026), to put itself at the right speed and trajectory to enter Jupiter's orbit and begin a mission that foresees at least 49 close flybys of Europa.
Clipper is expected to become the third spacecraft in history to enter orbit around Jupiter, after Galileo (1995) and Juno (2016), both from NASA. The European Juice was launched earlier (2023), but will make its orbital insertion later (2031), thus becoming the fourth Jovian orbiter.
With its 22-meter solar panels, the six-ton probe (including onboard fuel) will generate 600 watts to operate its nine instruments, even though it is five times further from the Sun than Earth. The idea is to use its cameras, spectrometers, radar and radio system to carry out a detailed examination of Europa, including investigating the configuration of the liquid water ocean that hides beneath the moon's ice crust.
Discovered by Galileo Galilei in 1610, it is about 3,120 km in diameter, slightly smaller than the Earth's Moon (3,475 km). But the most bombastic revelation about it came with the mission that paid homage to the famous Italian astronomer, Galileo, which indicated the presence of the internal ocean, possibly in contact with a rocky bed with hydrothermal vents.
On Earth, these appear to have been the circumstances that led to the emergence of life. Whether something similar could have happened in Europa is unknown, but the idea of European life forms has already been established in science fiction at least since the book "2010: A Space Odyssey 2", by Arthur C. Clarke, from 1982. (and made into a film in 1984). Clipper Europe, however, will be more focused on facts than fiction.
The initiative does not have the stated objective of finding European life, but it will attempt to characterize the subsurface ocean and its contents in detail, confirming its habitability. One of the most exciting prospects is the study of water plumes that can be ejected through cracks in the ice crust, being exposed to space. Clipper will try to fly over them, similar to what the Cassini probe did with Saturn's icy moon Enceladus between 2005 and 2015 - another potential habitable environment (at least for microorganisms) in the Solar System.
Clipper's task, however, is more challenging. The environment around Europa is bathed in an intense radiation belt generated by Jupiter's magnetic field, which forced NASA to adopt a "come and run" strategy, with rapid sequential flybys, during laps around Jupiter, in instead of a stop in orbit around the moon.
The effort required the spacecraft to be designed with titanium and aluminum reinforcements to protect the electronics against radiation. And even then there will be no lack of emotion. In the final phase of preparation for launch, it was discovered that transistors similar to those on board, made to withstand the hostile environment around Europa, were failing in less severe radiation conditions.
For four months, NASA carried out exhaustive tests of these components and their functioning together. If it was necessary to change them, the mission would have to be postponed. But, at the beginning of September, the agency announced that it had a safety margin in all circuits involved to successfully carry out the mission. The launch schedule and the expectation that the spacecraft can operate for around four years in orbit around Jupiter, as planned, were maintained.
As a result, the launch could take place from this Monday (14), but with some safety margin, in a window that extends until the beginning of November.