Europa Clipper: the NASA mission that left for a moon of Jupiter in search of living conditions

The probe took off last Monday, October 14, Kennedy Space Center (Florida) aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket, a first step in what will be a journey of more than three billion kilometers to its goal, which is expected to arrive in April 2030. Once there and over the next four years, it will fly 49 times over the moon Europa, just 25 kilometers from its surface, where thick layers of ice perhaps hide an ocean that, scientists speculate, could harbor life in its depths.

“It is the most complex planetary probe ever made. Much more elaborate than the Huygens probe that visited Titan or the rovers that currently travel around Mars“, Peruvian astrophysicist Jorge Heraud, founder of the Institute of Radio Astronomy (INRAS) of the PUCP, told El Comercio.

It is so that the Europa Clipperwhich measures around 30 meters long with its solar panels extended, has sophisticated instrument panels that include cameras, radars, magnetometers and spectrographs that will help analyze the satellite’s composition. The technological set It has cost the US space agency around US$5.2 billion. Despite the astronomical price, the project budget could have been higher if all the wishes of the company had been implemented. NASA.

“The original idea was to send a probe to land on the surface and make some attempts to penetrate the ice, but since little is still known about the terrain in Europa And in order not to end up with a failure, it was decided to send this probe to find out the conditions of the satellite’s ice layers and the emanations that come out of its cracks,” Heraud added. “In the past, I had even talked about sending a small submarine to drill through the ice and reach the watery part, but there is still not enough material to design a successful mission, since it costs a lot of money.”

The recipe for life

To be clearer, the mission Europa Clipper It does not literally hope to find an extraterrestrial being, but rather to ensure that the moon meets the necessary conditions to be habitable, an issue that is complicated because the layer of ice that covers Europa prevents any possible form of life from depending directly on the Sun for energy. like plants do on Earth.

To talk about the possible signs of life that the probe will look for, we spoke with René Ortega Minakata, an astrophysicist at the Morelia Campus of the Institute of Radio Astronomy and Astrophysics of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). “One of the objectives of the Europa Clipper mission will be to verify if the conditions on Europa are habitable and one of the main characteristics that life as we know it on Earth needs is water,” Ortega explained. “The other is the obtaining of energy and in the case of Europa – like Enceladus on Saturn or Callisto and Ganymede on Jupiter -, They are close enough to their giant planets that they experience tidal forces, which causes their oceans to warm and create the conditions necessary for a living organism.”

The last condition is a certain chemical composition and in this René Ortega used as an example the organisms that live on Earth next to underwater fissures caused by volcanic activity. “Part of the energy that these living organisms have comes from certain molecules and precisely part of the probe’s mission is to review their possible presence in the oceans of this moon.”. In any case, he recalled that Europa Clipper is only intended to confirm whether the satellite maintains the conditions to be habitable and not to find extraterrestrial life, so it would fall into a subsequent mission to find it, searching for traces left by biochemical processes that could indicate the presence of life.

Could there be extraterrestrial beings as such? This is a question that dips into the realm of speculation, although René Ortega suspects that if these existed, they would probably be microorganisms that were adapted to the specific conditions that we assume Europe has. Meanwhile, Peruvian astrophysicist Jorge Heraud points out that some scientists hope that they could be organisms that are a little more developed than simple single-celled beings. “Maybe some have their own locomotion like fish or something similar. We have no idea, but there is every hope of finding suitable conditions for life.”, he noted.

Perhaps more important than finding life or different forms of it would be the fact that this mission could put us closer to answering the eternal question of whether we are alone in the universe.

“If life is discovered in this ocean – or the possibility of sufficient conditions for its existence – It would be an indication to understand that life in the universe can be much easier to find than we think.”Heraud highlights. “Until now we have no vision of the existence of life anywhere other than our planet and we believe we are the center of the universe, so finding even a trace of extraterrestrial existence would be a tremendous cultural leap and one of the greatest discoveries in the world.” history of humanity.”