“Attempt No Landing There.”

Dear Friends:


Arthur C Clarke, author of 2001 A Space Odyssey,  famously warned against a mission to explore the most intriguing of Jupiter’s 79 moons, which has now been given the green light to proceed to the final stages of development of NASA’s Europa Clipper Mission.

It is proposed that the NASA mission will make a number of close flybys – it cannot orbit the moon as Jupiter’s radiation belt would fry its electronics – carrying cameras and intruments to measure the moon’s magnetic field.

The mission will look for subsurface lakes and provide data on the thickness of the moon’s icy crust. The team also hope to confirm the presence of plumes of water, previously detected by NASA’s Galileo spacecraft and the Hubble space telescope. If confirmed, it would mean scientists would not need to find a way of hacking through the moon’s icy crust to explore the makeup of the ocean.

The go-ahead for the final design to be made for the 2025 Europa Clipper mission spacecraft to be built and the instruments to be developed and tested. The mission spacecraft that will conduct detailed reconnaissance to see whether the icy orb could harbour conditions suitable for life. 

Scientists believe there’s a massive salty ocean beneath Europa’s icy surface that reaches 100 kilometres below the base of the ice –a depth 10 times greater than the Marianas Trench.