Europa Clipper Mission Update
Channel: Northern Virginia Astronomy Club
Date: 2024-02-12

Europa, an intriguing moon of Jupiter, has an icy exterior with a deep salty ocean beneath. Owing to its slightly eccentric orbit, this world undergoes tidal forcing that not only provides heat that maintains its liquid ocean but may also cause hydrothermal activity at its seafloor. This activity can provide nutrients and enable the reductant-oxidant mixing needed to support a habitable environment within Europa’s ocean. The Europa Clipper mission (https://europa.nasa.gov), scheduled to launch in October of this year(!!), will investigate Europa to constrain its habitability and seek to further understand its geology, interior, composition, and search for any current activity. If Europa harbors the needed conditions and ingredients for supporting life, potential follow-on missions could search for biosignatures there, and at other ocean worlds, potentially making the first discovery of life beyond Earth.

Dr. Kate Craft from the John Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory will bring us up-to-date on the Europa Clipper mission, which will soon disembark on its journey to explore the intriguing moon Europa in the Jovian system. Dr Craft is a member of the team responsible for maximizing the scientific potential of the data that the Clipper’s instruments will measure. She is also a member of a team studying the possibility of a future cryobot mission to the subsurface of Europa.