NASA to Send Mission to Jupiter's Moon Europa to Search for Life

NASA wants to send a mission to Jupiter's moon Europa to find out if there is life on it, the space agency's website reports.

The Europa Clipper mission is scheduled to take off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 12:06 a.m. local time on 14 October. The previous launch was cancelled due to Hurricane Milton.

The spacecraft will cover almost 3.2 billion kilometres and will reach the finish line in 2030.

‘This is a chance for us to explore not a world that might have been habitable billions of years ago, but a world that might be habitable today, right now,’ said Kurt Niebuhr, a mission scientist, as quoted by The Guardian.

The 30-metre-long spacecraft weighs 6 tonnes. It is equipped with large solar panels, which are needed to generate enough energy, as well as 9 instruments, including cameras to map the satellite's surface and radar to look beneath Europe's thick ice sheet.

The mission will also look for traces of organic compounds and gases to assess whether the moon is habitable.

According to preliminary observations, it has giant water flows and signs of an underground ocean 129 kilometres deep. It may contain twice as much salt water as Earth, but is covered by a layer of ice about 20 kilometres thick.

‘Water is essential for life as we know it, and if we're going to find life anywhere in the solar system, it's very likely to be on an icy moon like this one,’ said Dr Caroline Harper, Head of Space Science at NASA in the UK.

If life has emerged on Jupiter's moon, which is the same size as the Earth's satellite, it could be detected during the mission.

However, during the launch, the spacecraft will encounter extreme levels of radiation because Jupiter has a huge magnetic field that ejects charged particles into the satellite.

Despite all the damage that radiation can cause, it can produce fuel for life. If the high-energy particles split water molecules into oxygen and hydrogen in Europe's thin atmosphere, some of the oxygen can reach the ocean and react with other chemicals to provide energy to alien microbes.

‘It's exciting to think that within the next decade we could have definitive scientific evidence of the potential for habitable worlds beyond our planet,’ Harper said.