NASA , in conjunction with other space agencies , has sought to explore various celestial bodies near Earth and, using man-made objects, has reached the farthest reaches of the galaxy . In their quest to find life elsewhere, they have found a way to reach Jupiter's moon Europa using a space probe called the Europa Clipper.
Last week, it was announced that assembly had already begun on the probe that will be launched aboard the SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket once it is completed, which is expected to be in October 2024. The machine is one of the largest ever developed for a planetary mission, as the solar panels that will power it alone will be the size of a basketball court.
Here's what we know about the Europa Clipper mission
The work is being carried out in the halls of the agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California. There, over the next two years, engineers and technicians will finish assembling the spacecraft by hand before it is tested. It's worth noting that the body alone is 10 feet (3 meters) tall and 5 feet (1,5 meters) wide. This aluminum cylinder houses electronics, radios, heat-loop tubes, wiring, and the propulsion system.
Jupiter is the fifth planet from the Sun and the second largest celestial body in our Solar System. One of its most remarkable features is the large number of natural satellites orbiting it. To date, astronomers and researchers have identified 79 moons of Jupiter, although it is believed that it may have more than 600, the vast majority of which are hidden from view.
Jordan Evans, the mission's project manager at JPL, emphasized that this is an exciting moment and a major milestone, as this delivery brings them one step closer to launching and beginning scientific research on Europa Clipper. The spacecraft is scheduled to perform 50 flybys of Jupiter's moon, at altitudes between 25 and 2700 km above its surface.
Each flight will cover a different sector of the ice sheet to achieve a medium-quality overall topographic survey, including the thickness of the ice. It is also expected to fly at very low altitudes to penetrate the plumes of water vapor rising from the thin ice crust, allowing for ocean sampling without landing or breaking through the ice.
Scientists believe this planet harbors an internal ocean with twice the volume of water as all the oceans on Earth combined. Furthermore, they believe it may have the right conditions to support life.
But this won't be known until the spacecraft's nine scientific instruments collect data on the atmosphere, surface, and interior of the ocean . Researchers will use this information to measure the ocean's depth and salinity, the thickness of the ice crust, and any plumes that may be spewing water from the subsurface into space.
"If there is life on Europa, it is almost certainly completely independent of the origin of life on Earth."
Robert Pappalardo, project scientist.
Since March, the "assembly, testing and launch operations" phase has been underway, and since then, the instruments for its construction have arrived, such as the ultraviolet spectrograph, called Europa-UVS , the spacecraft's thermal emission imaging tool, E-THEMIS, a kind of sophisticated infrared camera designed to map Europa's temperatures.
It is expected that by the end of this year some of the flight hardware and the rest of the scientific instruments will be complete, in order to move to the next level.
NASA's other missions to Jupiter
Among other missions to the big planet is the one carried out by the Juno probe of the New Frontiers space program, launched in 2011 from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida and which entered orbit on July 5, 2016. Still active, its purpose is to study the planet's atmosphere, its origin, structure and evolution within the solar system, to better understand its formation.
Recently, the Netherlands Institute for Space Research (SRON) revealed an unexpected finding: this first gas giant has a greater concentration of metals around its core. This suggests it formed from rock rather than from hydrogen and helium, as many astronomers had theorized.
Aside from this mission, there is the Galileo space probe, which completed its mission in 2003 after its launch in 1989. It was the first in-situ exploration of the atmosphere of a giant planet. Among its main scientific discoveries are the findings regarding Europa's subsurface ocean , which they now intend to investigate further.
