Searching for life around Jupiter

If all goes well, this will be the second mission of its kind, since the European probe GOOS (Jupiter’s Icy Moons Explorer) On the way since 2023, expected to arrive in 2031.

However, the images from the Pioneer, Voyager and Galileo probes that have been in the area since the 1970s, respectively, have shown nothing encouraging: a grey, cracked surface. The fact that this surface is ice, not rock, however, is the heart of the mystery: the cracks, as well as the apparent absence of impact craters, reveal that this “layer” of ice – several tens of kilometres thick – is not immobile. It is moving, and thus cracking randomly, as you would expect if it were resting on a “layer” of water. All this is aided by the gravitational forces of the giant planet, Jupiter, forces that create a tidal effect, much like the Moon does on Earth, causing Europa’s rocky surface to heat up enough to melt some of the ice.

This description is not just a theory. Since 2016, we have observed Heaters » – Either something, gas or liquid, occasionally oozes out through one of the cracks (the Cassini spacecraft observed the same phenomenon in 2005 on Enceladus, an icy moon of Saturn). Again, it’s as you’d expect, if there’s water underneath. That makes this icy moon Jupiter’s fourth-largest moon, One of the most dangerous candidates To the existence of some form of life somewhere other than our planet.

but Proving that won’t be easy.That’s why it took so long to send a space probe there. And even if Clipper or Juice could land on the surface—which they won’t—they wouldn’t be able to drill through tens of kilometers of ice in search of these hypothetical microscopic marine organisms.

So Clipper will be observing it from a close orbit around Europa. Juice, as its name suggests, is targeting the icy “moons” (Europa, Ganymede, Callisto). But if the Earthlings who sent these two spacecraft are lucky, they could be in the right place to analyze the chemical composition of one of these geysers: the presence of organic matter could be the expected clue.

Earthlings aren’t counting on that alone. The nine instruments aboard Clipper will have to perform geophysical analyses—to understand how these cracks form and break—and chemical analyses. The interactions between the ice of the giant planet that dominates the sky and its other large moons nearby have inevitably created, over millions of years, a complex chemistry, What amazes astronomersQ – This is whether there is life or not.

The data set could point to areas that are more interesting than others — perhaps areas where the ocean rises to the surface more often — and thus provide targets for future missions.

“With Europa Clipper, we are truly entering a new phase of astrobiology.” Comments in New world One of the members of the mission is scientist Sam Howell. If “his” space probe Takes off as planned in October.Aboard a SpaceX Falcon rocket, it is supposed to reach Jupiter’s orbit in 2030, a year ahead of Gus.