Europa Clipper ready to depart Earth to search for signs of extraterrestrial life

If all goes well, the Europa Clipper space probe will leave Earth in October 2024 to begin a mission whose results could mark a turning point in the search for extraterrestrial life.

There are many indications that the ingredients for life – water, the right chemistry, and energy that can be used by living things – may already exist on Jupiter’s moon Europa. In particular, the moon is believed to contain a salty subsurface sea with twice as much water as Earth’s oceans combined. This vast sea is likely to contain organic compounds and energy sources that can be used by living things. If the mission is able to determine that Europa is habitable, it would mean that there may be more habitable worlds in our solar system and the universe at large than science has previously believed.

Europa Clipper is equipped with NASA’s most sophisticated suite of scientific instruments yet. To determine whether Europa is habitable, Europa Clipper must assess the star’s interior, composition and geology. The spacecraft carries nine scientific instruments and a gravity experiment that uses NASA’s telecommunications system.

With its antennas and solar panels fully deployed, Europa Clipper is the largest spacecraft NASA has ever developed for a planetary mission. The craft spans about 100 feet (30 meters) from end to end and is about 60 feet (18 meters) wide. That massive size is largely due to its solar panels, which must be enormous to collect enough sunlight in the orbital region around Jupiter, five times farther from the Sun than Earth. That electricity will be vital to powering the craft’s instruments and electrical systems.

Europa Clipper’s journey will be long and winding, as to minimize fuel requirements and take advantage of the cargo capacity freed up for other things, the craft will need to rely on maneuvers known as gravity assists, which involve passing very close to planets so that they can accelerate the craft or help it maneuver in other ways.

Europa Clipper will perform a gravity assist flyby of Mars in February 2025. It will return to the vicinity of Earth in January 2026 for another such assist. Finally, it will reach Jupiter and enter orbit around it in April 2030. Its orbit will allow it to fly by Europa no less than 40 times, occasionally coming so close as to fly as close as 25 kilometres above the surface.

Artist’s impression of Europa Clipper orbiting Jupiter. (Illustration: NASA JPL/Caltech)

Currently, around a thousand people are working on the mission. Since it was officially approved in 2015, more than four thousand people have done so.

And more than 2.6 million people are symbolically taking part in the mission. That’s the number of people who typed their names into a form on the mission’s website. The names of all these people, from almost every country in the world, have been recorded on a microchip installed on the spacecraft. In this way, their names will travel to the Jupiter system. (Source: NCYT by Amazings)