PRIMITIVE LIFE
While Europa’s existence has been known since 1610, the first close-up images were taken by the Voyager probes in 1979, which revealed mysterious reddish lines crisscrossing its surface.
The next probe to reach Jupiter’s icy moon was NASA’s Galileo probe in the 1990s, which found it was highly likely that the moon was home to an ocean.
This time, the Europa Clipper carries a host of sophisticated instruments, including cameras, a spectrograph, radar and a magnetometer to measure its magnetic forces.
The mission will look to determine the structure and composition of Europa’s surface, its depth, and even the salinity of its ocean, as well as the way the two interact – to find out, for example, if water rises to the surface in places.
The aim is to understand whether the three ingredients necessary for life are present: water, energy and certain chemical compounds.
If these conditions exist on Europa, life could be found in the ocean in the form of primitive bacteria, explained Bonnie Buratti, the mission’s deputy project scientist.
But the bacteria would likely be too deep for the Europa Clipper to see.
