(VOR News) – Could life exist anywhere else in our solar system? An enormous NASA spacecraft will launch on Monday for a five-and-a-half year journey to Europa, one of Jupiter’s moons. It will be the first step in understanding Europa’s geology.

Thanks to the Europa Clipper mission, the US space agency will be able to learn more about the moon, which despite its icy surface, experts believe may contain an ocean of liquid water.

Launch on a sturdy SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket is scheduled for Monday, October 14, “no earlier than” from Cape Canaveral, Florida, according to a NASA notice.

“NASA spokesperson Gina DiBraccio said in a news briefing last month.”

Europe is among the most intriguing locations for the search for extraterrestrial life.” The objective of the mission is to determine if Europa contains the essential components for life, rather than specifically seeking evidence of life.

If so, it would have to be searched for by a different expedition.

Oversighting the Europa Clipper program, scientist Curt Niebur told reporters last month that there was a chance to “explore not a world that might have been habitable billions of years ago, like Mars, but a world that might be habitable today, right now.”

The probe is the largest spacecraft NASA has ever built for extraterrestrial travel. Its width is thirty meters when its large solar panels, which are designed to absorb the little light that reaches Jupiter, are fully extended.

A primitive way of life?

Even though there have been images of Europa since 1610, the Voyager spacecraft took the first close-ups of the planet in 1979, which showed mysterious reddish lines crisscrossing its surface.

After arriving at Jupiter’s ice moon in the 1990s, NASA’s Galileo mission came to the conclusion that there was a strong likelihood that an ocean existed there.

This time, the Europa Clipper mission will be equipped with an array of sophisticated sensors, including cameras, a spectrograph, radar, and a magnetometer to measure its magnetic forces. The mission will attempt to determine the structure, composition, depth, and ocean salinity of Europa’s frozen surface in order to determine, for example, whether water rises to the surface in certain regions.

The objective is to ascertain the presence or absence of three essential factors for life: energy, water, and particular chemical molecules.

Primitive bacteria may be present in the water on Europa if certain conditions are met, according to deputy project scientist Bonnie Buratti. The microorganisms may be too deep for the Europa Clipper to see, though.

What happens, then, if Europa isn’t actually habitable? That also begs many other questions, like: Why did we think about this? And why is it absent?”

A NASA executive named Nikki Fox said:

The probe is anticipated to traverse 2.9 billion kilometers (1.8 billion miles) and arrive at Jupiter in April 2030.

The principal objective will remain the focus for an additional four years. There are 49 planned close flybys of Europa, with the probe approaching within 25 kilometers (16 miles) of the planet’s surface.

It will endure tremendous levels of radiation exposure; a single pass equates to millions of chest X-rays. Approximately 4,000 individuals have been engaged on the $5.2 billion project over the previous decade.

NASA contends that the cost is warranted by the significance of the data to be gathered.

Niebur, the Europa Clipper program scientist, remarked, “Consider the implications if our solar system contains two habitable worlds, Europa and Earth, when extrapolated to the billions of other solar systems in this galaxy.”

“Disregarding the inquiry of ‘Is there life?’ on Europa, the mere consideration of habitability introduces a significant new paradigm for the search for life within the galaxy,” he stated.

The European Space Agency’s (ESA) Juice probe will simultaneously operate with the Europa Clipper mission, focusing on the study of Ganymede and Callisto, two more moons of Jupiter.

SOURCE: FN