Jupiter’s moon Europa hides an ocean of water beneath its icy crust that might harbor extraterrestrial life.
Unfortunately, big dollar signs have kept alive the fictional decree in Arthur C. Clarke’s Space Odyssey series to leave Europa alone: No robot has ever landed on, drilled into or orbited the chilly world. Only a handful of spacecraft have flown by.
A panel of scientists determined in 2011 that NASA’s plans to explore the moon with a single spacecraft, called the Jupiter Europa Orbiter, or JEO, would cost about $4.7 billion. That amount of cash, they wrote, “is so high that both a decrease in mission scope and an increase in NASA’s planetary budget are necessary to make it affordable.”
But even before the panel slammed the mission’s financial feasibility, astrobiologist Pabulo Henrique Rampelotto of Brazil’s Federal University of Pampa was plotting to save exploration of Europa.
In a study published July 13 in Astrobiology, Rampelotto argues that nixing one large orbiter and instead sending three small spacecraft — two orbiters and a probe carrying surface impactors — could spread out both the cost and the risk while hitting all of JEO’s science goals, and then some.
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