Sometime in the early 2030s, NASA hopes to attempt a landing on Jupiter’s moon Europa. A four-legged spacecraft would descend towards the icy surface, ready to hunt for signs of alien life in a buried ocean.
But Europa could be a treacherous place to land. Its surface may be unexpectedly hard — or so porous that the probe might sink into it. And giant crevasses threaten to swallow any visitor. With an extremely thin atmosphere, low gravity, and bone-chilling temperatures of just 100 kelvin (–176 °C), Europa poses formidable challenges to spacecraft engineers.
“We really just don’t know enough,” says Cynthia Phillips, a planetary scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California. She and others are discussing ideas for a Europa lander this week at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in The Woodlands, Texas.
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