WASHINGTON: The quest to explore Earth-like planets continues unabated. The recent candidate is Europa, one of the largest moons of Jupiter which is believed to have sustained life in the past. A $2 billion mission of NASA plans to search for these signs.
Europa is thought to be one of the best known candidates to support life. The scientists speculate that similar conditions like those on Earth might have existed at the bottom of massive ocean beneath the crust of Europa.
However, Europa’s environment is extreme relative to ours but the previous missions have found signs that it may contain all the necessities for life like water, nutrients and also a source of energy.
NASA plans to send the $2 billion mission to Europa in the 2020s. The team from the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel has proposed to send a spacecraft to orbit Jupiter and survey the habitation possibilities on Europa.
Curt Niebur, a program scientist working on the mission at NASA headquarters in Washington stated, “The tricky thing about it is, detecting life is very, very difficult. We don’t have an instrument that’s a life detector that can spit out an answer and say, ‘Yes, that’s alive”.
The data to study Europa would be collected from eight spacecraft including NASA’s Voyager and mostly from Galileo missions.
Europa is one of Jupiter’s four largest moons, 1,900 miles wide, orbiting Jupiter every 85 hours. The planet is icy cold and the highest temperature recorded is -260 degrees. Europa is known as ‘Galilean satellites’ as it was discovered by Galileo Galilei in 1610.
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