Europa Clipper will head to the Saturnian moon next month, weather permitting, and examine it for potential habitability—if not by us then some form of life. CNN reports on the extensive series of tests that had to be completed for the mission to launch and the challenges the probe will face, not least a dangerous dip into Jupiter's radiation belt on its flyby there. NASA's Curt Neibur:
"There was no harder year than this past year and especially this past summer," Niebur said. "But through all of that, the one thing that we never doubted was that this was going to be worth it. It's a chance for us to explore, not a world that might have been habitable billions of years ago, but a world that might be habitable today — a chance to do the first exploration of this new kind of world that we've discovered very recently called an ocean world that is just totally immersed and covered in a liquid water ocean completely unlike anything we've seen before. That's what's waiting us at Europa."
Clipper won't look for life, but if it finds evidence of habitability will be followed by a probe that will. And you know what that means. We have been warned!
Here's this mission's "Golden Record."
Previously:
• NASA's unbelievably sadistic coloring book
• NASA causes panic with livestreamed simulation audio
• NASA 'Webbsite' shows the progress of the James Webb Space Telescope
