NASA on Tuesday announced the nine instruments that will participate in a mission that could be worth around $2 billion over its program life to investigate whether Europa, Jupiter’s icy moon, could harbor conditions suitable for life.
NASA selected: Plasma Instrument for Magnetic Sounding (PIMS); Interior Characterization of Europa using Magnetometer (ICEMAG); Mapping Imaging Spectrometer for Europa (MISE); Europa Imaging System (EIS); Radar for Europa Assessment and Sounding: Ocean to Near-Surface (REASON); Europa Thermal Emission Imaging System (E-THEMIS); Mass Spectrometer for Planetary Exploration/Europa (MASPEX); Ultraviolent Spectrograph/Europa (UVS) and Surface Dust Mass Analyzer (SUDA). The Space Environmental and Composition Investigation near the Europan Surface (SPECIES) was also chosen for further technology development.
The payload of selected science instruments includes cameras and spectrometers to produce high-resolution images of Europa’s surface and determine its composition. An ice penetrating radar will determine the thickness of the moon’s icy shell and search for subsurface lakes similar to those beneath Antarctica. The mission will also carry a magnetometer to measure the strength and direction of Europa’s magnetic field, which will allow scientists to determine the depth and salinity of its ocean, according to a NASA statement.
Thirty-three instruments were reviewed. Launch is scheduled for the “2020s,” according to the civil space agency.
NASA Director of Planetary Science Jim Green during a Tuesday media briefing called instrument selection a “tremendous opportunity” to “really get serious” by competing initial studies and move the mission into what the agency calls formulation. NASA, Green said, plans to have this key decision point of starting formulation accomplished before the end of September.
While the agency projects requesting $285 million for Europa over the next five fiscal years, including $30 million requested for FY ’16, lawmakers could provide more than four-times what NASA requested for FY ’16. The House Appropriations Committee (HAC) last week approved the commerce, justice and science (CJS) subcommittee’s markup for its portion of a FY ’16 spending bill that provides $140 million for Europa.
NASA was allocated $100 million in FY ’15 for Europa. The spending bill also requires the agency to use the Space Launch System (SLS) as the launch vehicle and to plan for a launch no later than 2022. Green said the entire mission could be worth around $2 billion, not including the launch vehicle, based on some basic mission concepts that NASA is exploring in “great detail.”
NASA Europa Program Scientist Curt Niebur said Tuesday during the media briefing that the instruments could be ready in the early 2020s, but he didn’t specify exactly when, adding the early 2020s goal is dependent on how much money is in the budget for that work. Niebur said NASA will spend about $10 million, over the next year or so, on the instruments while spending about $110 million on instruments over the next three years.
The Europa mission would send a solar-powered spacecraft into a long, looping orbit around the gas giant Jupiter to perform repeated close flybys of the moon over a three-year period. In total, the mission would perform 45 flybys at altitudes ranging from 16 miles to 1,700 miles.
NASA said its Galileo mission yielded strong evidence that Europa, about the size of Earth’s moon, has an ocean beneath a frozen crust of unknown thickness. If proven to exist, this global ocean could have more than twice as much water as Earth. With abundant salt water, a rocky sea floor and the energy and chemistry provided by tidal heating, NASA believes Europa could be the best place in the solar system to look for present day life beyond Earth.
The PIMS instrument works in conjunction with a magnetometer and is key to determining Europa’s ice shell thickness, ocean depth and salinity by correcting the magnetic induction signal for plasma currents around Europa. ICEMAG will measure the magnetic field near Europa and, in conjunction with PIMS, infer the location, thickness and salinity of Europa’s subsurface ocean using multi-frequency electromagnetic sounding. The MISE instrument will probe the composition of Europa, identifying and mapping the distributions of organics, salts, acid hydrates, water ice phases and other materials to determine the habitability of Europa’s ocean.