It’s the spring of 2031. A robotic scientist has spent a year silently sailing through the darkness around Jupiter, watching the planet’s atmospheric maelstroms twist and turn from afar. But today, something different—something wondrous—rushes into view. Its ice-covered surface is scored with chasms, as if scratched out by a deity’s claws. Icebergs convulse in the straitjacketed terrain. Mucilaginous secretions of alien frost seep out of the orb’s frozen shell. And on the horizon, water vapor and ice crystals jettisoned into the night by a mysterious explosive force sparkle in the starlight.
This is Jupiter’s moon Europa—a world as seductive as any in the Solar System—and this is the view that NASA hopes will greet its Europa Clipper spacecraft, which will begin its journey to the Jupiter system next month. Yet, for all the razzle dazzle of Europa’s surface, it is not the main attraction. Something extraordinary is concealed beneath the ice: a liquid saltwater ocean, potentially as clement and welcoming to life as Earth’s.
Equipped with a battery of nine science instruments, Clipper will swoop past Europa in a series of nearly 50 ice-skimming flybys, remotely probing the ocean in hopes of finding a chemistry that could support life. If water from that ocean percolates through conduits in the ice and rockets into space as a plume, Clipper might even be capable of detecting microbes directly, although few on the mission dare to raise such hopes.
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