What landing sites on Jupiter’s moon, Europa, would be the most ideal for searching for life on the small moon? This is what a recent study published in The Planetary Science Journal hopes to address as a team of researchers led by the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) investigated how NASA’s Europa Clipper, which is currently en route to Jupiter, could scout the small moon for landing sites for a potential future lander. This study has the potential to help researchers maximize scientific returns for a potential future Europa lander even before that mission is developed and launched.
For the study, the researchers analyzed the Europa Clipper flight plan regarding its 49 scheduled flybys of the small moon to ascertain how many of these flybys could be used to scout for future landing sites on Europa’s surface. In the end, the researchers found that 12 of the 49 scheduled flybys of Europa Clipper were considered “reconable” flybys, meaning they could be used to scout for potential landing sites for a future lander, the latter of which would used a computer-driven technique called terrain relative navigation (TRN) to land on the surface, which NASA’s Perseverance rover used to land on Mars in 2021.
“The rankings of the flybys we present are based on our best present-day understanding of Europa, which is largely based on Galileo data,” the study notes. “The rankings are thus highly likely to change when we observe the reconable areas with Europa Clipper. This is especially true for reconable areas that were not observed at high resolution with Galileo. While the rankings will be updated, this work provides an important guidebook to the reconable and supporting Europa Clipper flybys, which can be used by the team during operations at Europa in the 2030s.”
Featured Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Europa is high on a target list for astrobiology as it contains a large liquid volume of salty liquid water beneath its icy crust that scientists hypothesize could possess life as we know it. One of the primary mission objectives of Europa Clipper is to ascertain the moon’s habitability along with planning for future missions like a lander.
What landing sites will Europa Clipper locate for a potential future lander during its mission? Only time will tell, and this is why we science!
As always, keep doing science & keep looking up!
Sources: The Planetary Science Journal
