Posted on 07/24/2021 11:44:58 AM PDT by BenLurkin
NASA has selected Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (SpaceX) of Hawthorne, California, to provide launch services for Earth’s first mission to conduct detailed investigations of Jupiter's moon Europa.
The Europa Clipper mission will launch in October 2024 on a Falcon Heavy rocket from Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The total contract award amount for launch services is approximately $178 million.
Europa Clipper will conduct a detailed survey of Europa and use a sophisticated suite of science instruments to investigate whether the icy moon has conditions suitable for life. Key mission objectives are to produce high-resolution images of Europa's surface, determine its composition, look for signs of recent or ongoing geological activity, measure the thickness of the moon’s icy shell, search for subsurface lakes, and determine the depth and salinity of Europa's ocean.
NASA’s Launch Services Program at Kennedy will manage the Europa Clipper launch service. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California leads the development of the Europa Clipper mission in partnership with the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The Planetary Missions Program Office at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, executes program management of the Europa Clipper mission.
For more information about the Europa Clipper mission, visit:
https://www.nasa.gov/europa
(Excerpt) Read more at nasa.gov ...
Did Eskimos really come from Europa ?
SpaceX is really blowing away the competition these days.
Uh-oh
Yes, they out bid Boeing by 95% on this.
We are just beginning to unlock the possibilities of cheap space flight. There will be many exciting launches over the next decades.
Yep,
Boeing/SLS: It will cost you over 1 billon dollars but we haven’t built it yet so you’ll have to wait over a year later than when you want it and it will probably cost alot more than a billion.
SpaceX: We got one on the shelf right now, Let’s see, it’s marked down to 178 mil plus we can throw in a new Tesla!
Agreed. I listened to the skeptics about the prospects of Space X and Tesla. Man oh man, the other guys were just a bunch of lying hound dogs. Elon Musk, in the Space X early days, tried to buy rocket engines from Russia. They laughed. He tried to hire the best rocket scientist talent- they would not return his calls. So he had to be his own project manager. He hit the books, and now he has not just a rocket engine, but a PROCESS of continuous improvement for manufacturing rocket engines.
He humbly says that if he could have hired better talent, maybe Space X’s first two rocket launches would not have failed.
By comparison, the NASA legacy suppliers wares are like fireworks from China.
Musk comes in with the mindset of a private-sector tycoon. He's going to leverage whatever he can to do more, do it better, do it faster, and do it with less $$.
https://www.heritagedaily.com/2022/08/underwater-snow-gives-clues-about-europas-icy-shell/144462
https://www.heritagedaily.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/shutterstock-1656893959-741x486.jpg
Image Credit : University of Texas at Austin
Underwater Snow Gives Clues About Europa’s Icy Shell
Below Europa’s Thick Icy Crust Is A Massive, Global Ocean Where The Snow Floats Upwards Onto Inverted Ice Peaks And Submerged Ravines.
The bizarre underwater snow is known to occur below ice shelves on Earth, but a new study shows that the same is likely true for Jupiter’s moon, where it may play a role in building its ice shell.
The underwater snow is much purer than other kinds of ice, which means Europa’s ice shell could be much less salty than previously thought. That’s important for mission scientists preparing NASA’s Europa Clipper spacecraft, which will use radar to peek beneath the ice shell to see if Europa’s ocean could be hospitable to life. The new information will be critical because salt trapped in the ice can affect what and how deep the radar will see into the ice shell, so being able to predict what the ice is made of will help scientists make sense of the data.
The study, published in the August edition of the journal Astrobiology, was led by The University of Texas at Austin, which is also leading the development of Europa Clipper’s ice penetrating radar instrument. Knowing what kind of ice Europa’s shell is made of will also help decipher the salinity and habitability of its ocean.
“When we’re exploring Europa, we’re interested in the salinity and composition of the ocean, because that’s one of the things that will govern its potential habitability or even the type of life that might live there,” said the study’s lead author Natalie Wolfenbarger, a graduate student researcher at the University of Texas Institute for Geophysics (UTIG) in the UT Jackson School of Geosciences.
Europa is a rocky world about the size of the Earth’s moon that is surrounded by a global ocean and a miles-thick ice shell. Previous studies suggest the temperature, pressure and salinity of Europa’s ocean nearest to the ice is similar to what you would find beneath an ice shelf in Antarctica.
Armed with that knowledge, the new study examined the two different ways that water freezes under ice shelves, congelation ice and frazil ice. Congelation ice grows directly from under the ice shelf. Frazil ice forms as ice flakes in supercooled seawater which float upwards through the water, settling on the bottom of the ice shelf.
Both ways make ice that’s less salty than seawater, which Wolfenbarger found would be even less salty when scaled up to the size and age of Europa’s ice shell. What’s more, according to her calculations, frazil ice – which keeps only a tiny fraction of the salt in seawater – could be very common on Europa. That means its ice shell could be orders of magnitude purer than previous estimates. This affects everything from its strength, to how heat moves through it, and forces that might drive a kind of ice tectonics.
“This paper is opening up a whole new batch of possibilities for thinking about ocean worlds and how they work,” said Steve Vance, a research scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) who was not involved in the study. “It sets the stage for how we might prepare for Europa Clipper’s analysis of the ice.”
According to co-author Donald Blankenship, a senior research scientist at UTIG and principal investigator for Europa Clipper’s ice penetrating radar instrument, the research is validation for using the Earth as a model to understand the habitability of Europa.
“We can use Earth to evaluate Europa’s habitability, measure the exchange of impurities between the ice and ocean, and figure out where water is in the ice,” he said.
Wolfenbarger is currently pursuing a doctoral degree in geophysics at the UT Jackson School and is a graduate student affiliate member of the Europa Clipper science team.
The research was funded by the G. Unger Vetlesen Foundation and the Zonta International Amelia Earhart Fellowship.
University of Texas at Austin
Header Image Credit : University of Texas at Austin
https://doi.org/10.1089/ast.2021.0044
Oh nice, that was supposed to be a private reply.
[blush]
Interesting info. Water is a good thing to find!
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