Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – @BednarChuck
NASA officials have reportedly asked scientists to determine if the US space agency’s upcoming mission to Jupiter’s moon Europa could be used to search for signs of extraterrestrial life.
[STORY: NASA discusses future robotic lander mission to Europa]
The voyage to Europa, which could be ready to launch within the next decade, was initially not designed to seek out signs of alien life. Instead, Kevin Hand, Deputy Chief Scientist for Solar System Exploration at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, said earlier this month that the goal of the mission was “to understand habitability; the ingredients for life.”
However, as reported Friday by Space.com, NASA may be doing an about-face on that, as they are exploring the possibility of searching for evidence of organic life in water vapor plumes that blast into space from the moon’s southern polar region during the mission. Those plumes could give scientists a way to sample Europa’s buried ocean of liquid water, the website said.
Last call for aliens
During a workshop at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley on Wednesday, science chief John Grunsfeld told reporters that “this is our chance” to find out whether or not life exists on the Europa, and he hoped that they “don’t miss this opportunity for lack of ideas.”
As revealed in the agency’s 2016 budget, NASA plans to send an unmanned mission to Europa in order to study those vast oceans, which are buried beneath layers of ice. The spacecraft used on the mission will be known as the Europa Clipper, which will be comprised of an orbiter that will conduct roughly 45 flybys of the moon’s surface over the next three years.
Studying the plumes
Europa’s sub-surface ocean holds three times the amount of water as the oceans here on Earth. Experts hypothesize that it might hold life within its 62-mile (100-kilometer) deep waters. The oceans have been compared to the Mariana Trench, the deepest part of the Pacific Ocean, where complex biology has managed to evolve in depths of 6.8 miles (11 kilometers).
[STORY: Building blocks of life found on Europa]
Hand had previously explained that a surface mission would be required to actually search for life on the Jovian moon, and that such an endeavor was beyond NASA’s current technological capabilities. The Europa Clipper was intended to focus on measuring the depth, salinity, and other characteristics of the waters, as well as measuring and mapping the ice shell of the moon.
However, it now appears as though NASA may be considering attempting a plume-sampling maneuver in order to hunt for alien life on the moon, if it is deemed at all possible. Grunsfeld urged those attempting the workshop to “think outside the box” and come up with possible ways to study the waters in Europa’s plumes, Space.com reported on Friday.
“If one such idea could be incorporated into the upcoming mission, so much the better,” the website said. “After all, the earliest that Clipper (or whatever variant ultimately emerges) could blast off for Europa is 2022 – and, using currently operational rockets, the craft wouldn’t arrive in the Jupiter system until 2030, Grunsfeld pointed out. (Use of NASA’s Space Launch System megarocket, which is still in development, would cut the travel time significantly.)”
“And there’s no telling when NASA will be able to go back to Europa.” it added. “Grunsfeld stressed that he and other NASA higher-ups aren’t pushing to turn Clipper into a plume-centric project; the core goals of the Europa mission will remain centered on assessing the moon’s ability to support life… But he doesn’t want the plume opportunity to slip away for want of effort or focus.”
“I don’t want to be sitting in my rocking chair 20 years from now and think, ‘We should have done something,” said Grunsfeld.
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