Why Does NASA Want to Explore Jupiter’s Ocean Moon? (Europa Clipper Science Overview)

Everywhere there’s water on Earth, there’s life. Does that hold true elsewhere in our solar system? NASA’s Europa Clipper mission will investigate Jupiter’s icy moon Europa, which — with its subsurface ocean — is one of the most promising places in our solar system to find environments capable of supporting life. While Europa Clipper isn’t a life-detection mission, it will be the first to conduct a detailed survey of this icy moon to answer questions about Europa’s potential habitability and composition. The mission’s main goals are to determine the thickness of Europa’s icy shell; confirm the presence of an ocean; investigate the make-up of that ocean; and characterize the geology of the surface. The spacecraft will orbit Jupiter and make approximately 50 flybys of Europa. It’s equipped with a powerful suite of instruments that will work in sync to gather measurements and high-resolution images. Europa Clipper is expected to launch in October 2024 from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. It will arrive at the Jupiter system in 2030. For more information on the mission go to: https://europa.nasa.gov/. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/APL

What is said in the film

Everywhere on earth that there's water, there's life. We have several ocean worlds in our solar system. And by explore Europa we're getting a taste of what these ocean worlds are like. Europa is one of the moons of Jupiter. It's about the same size as our own moon a little bit smaller, but it's so much different.

It's an ice world. Europa probably has, beneath its icy surface, a global ocean of water. We think there are thermal vents in this vast subsurface ocean. There may be primitive organisms there, similar to the original primitive organisms on Earth, from which we all evolved. When we first discovered the hydrothermal vents on our sea floors on the Earth, we also discovered life.

There was no sunlight that was penetrating down that deep, but yet there was life living there. On Europa, we're not looking for life itself, we're just looking for an environment in which life could thrive. I just love Europa's surface. I think it's one of the most complex surfaces in our solar system. Typically, when you look at another planetary surface, it's covered with craters, just like our Moon.

There are very few, shockingly few impact craters. That means something is going on to erase the craters, just like happens here on Earth - and on Earth we call that geology. One of the key questions right now that we have about Europa is whether or not there is plume activity. Plumes are one way that you can definitely get ocean material to the surface. We really need a spacecraft in the system thats watching Europa to see when those plumes are happening, if they're happening.

The Europa Clipper mission will be the first in-depth exploration of an ocean world. Europa Clipper is orbiting Jupiter, and it's performing 49 flybys of Europa. And the main reason it's doing that is to stay mostly outside of Jupiter's really intense radiation belts. Each time we make a flyby, we turn on all of the instruments at once. Most of us know about cameras because that's what our eyes see.

But there is a whole slew of other instruments on board Europa Clipper that expands our vision. We have four different instruments that we're really using to take images of Europa’s surface. We have the visible wavelength, the near infrared, the far infrared and the UV - the ultraviolet. We're hoping to see evidence of change - new cracks, new surface colors that indicate different materials, maybe have moved around or come up from the subsurface. We have an instrument, that can sniff the very thin atmosphere, the gases, and determine the composition with extreme precision.

We're looking for signs of organics at Europa. Are there materials that contain carbon and hydrogen and oxygen and nitrogen? And we have another instrument that can tell us the composition of dust particles. We're pretty sure there are salts on Europa's surface. The salts may have come out of the ocean.

We want to understand, what are those salts? We have a magnetometer and a plasma instrument that are going to be studying that magnetosphere environment that Europa is sitting in and Jupiter's magnetosphere environment. The magnetic field of Europa, in turn, can tell us about the properties of the ocean. How thick is it and how salty is it? And then we have this novel ice penetrating radar that will try to get below the ice shell.

Last but not least, we have a gravity experiment using the communications system of the spacecraft. And from that, we can get essentially a map of the gravity field. We can get the shape, understand what's underneath, maybe even get some information on the depths of the ocean. It's really a sophisticated payload. So there really has not been a mission like Europa Clipper.

The pictures that we are going to get back are going to be just fantastic. The legacy of Europa Clipper will be just a treasure trove of knowledge about this, this world. Just to find an environment that is similar to the one from which life arose on Earth would really be groundbreaking. It would be awesome. I have no idea what we are going to detect beneath Europa's icy surface, but all I know is it's going to be wonderful.

We do this work of exploration for the next generation. We don't know if Earth is the only place that life got started, or if it's really common. And a really important way to get at that is to understand, is there life elsewhere in our solar system?

Where this page came from

This page was imported from [NASA](https://images.nasa.gov/details/JPL-20240515-CLIPPRf-0001-Europa Clipper Science Overview Video). NASA material is generally not copyrighted and is in the public domain.

Nobody has written it yet — it is the source material at a new address, which is why search engines are asked to skip it and why no one earns from it. It is up for grabs: take it on, and it is yours to rewrite and to earn from.