The spacecraft will set off on an eight-year journey to the solar system’s largest planet, focusing on moons that could offer clues in the search for extraterrestrial life.
A soon-to-launch European mission is the first of two spacecraft—the other from NASA—that will hunt for signs of habitability on Jupiter’s icy moons
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Meet the Unsung Heroes behind Humanity’s Improbable Journey to an Alien Ocean
The author of a new book reveals the hidden human history of NASA’s in-development Europa Clipper mission
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Artist’s concept of NASA’s Europa Clipper mission at Jupiter’s moon. Credit: NASA and JPL-Caltech
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Recent headlines aside, NASA’s most exciting interplanetary mission for the early 21st century is arguably not a robot named Perseverance presently roving around Mars gathering samples for a future return to Earth. Instead it is a spacecraft, just now on the verge of being built, that could launch later this decade to Europa, an enigmatic moon of Jupiter that boasts an enormous ocean bigger than all of Earth’s oceans combined beneath an icy crust. Called Europa Clipper, the mission could lift off as soon as 2024 to study the moon’s subsurface abyss with the goal of gauging its potential habitability and the distinct possibility of discovering a
Where Next Will NASA Boldly Go? 30/01/2021
An image of Jupiter’s swirling south polar region captured by NASA’s Juno spacecraft, December 2017. Image: NASA.
In February, NASA will land a nuclear-powered car on Mars. In 2022, the agency will be well into the construction of a Jupiter orbiter the length of a basketball court. Both missions called “flagships” because of their multibillion-dollar budgets and what NASA describes as “civilisation-scale science” for their potential impact are part of the agency’s search for life elsewhere in the solar system. But neither mission is likely to find life on its own, unless an animal scurries up to Perseverance rover’s camera or a geyser on Jupiter’s ocean moon blasts a fish into space right in front of Europa Clipper spacecraft.