Europa mission to seek hints of life

摘要

Is europa habitable? That's the question NASA hopes to answer in a mission tojupiter's icy moon, slated for sometime in the 2020s. On 26 May, NASA revealed the nine scientific instruments it has chosen to chip away at Europa's mysteries. Europa is the best candidate for hosting extraterrestrial life in the solar system, thanks to suspicions that an ocean lies beneath the moon's crust of ice, which could be several kilometres thick. The spacecraft will be solar-powered, and its three-year orbit of Jupiter will give it 45 f ly-bys of Europa. "We're trying to answer the big questions," said NASA science administrator John Grunsfeld in a press conference. "Where did we come from? Where are we going? And are we alone?" "The instrument suite they picked looks fabulous," says Cynthia Phillips of the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California. "It has everything you would want." The instruments will be able to examine Europa's surface, its subsurface, and the plumes the moon is thought to vent into space, but there will be no instrument designed to look for direct evidence of life.