NASA's Europa Clipper is set to look for signs of life on the icy moons of Enceladus and Europa. Learn about the development of tools that led us here.
NASA's Europa Clipper is set to look for signs of life on the icy moons of Enceladus and Europa. Learn about the development of tools that led us here.A new instrument aboard NASA’s Europa Clipper may be sensitive enough to detect any life emanating from the plumes of far-off icy moons like Saturn's Enceladus and Jupiter's Europa.
Enceladus and Europa are places of scientific interest because of their observed water features. In 1972, researchers first noticed thatsurface was covered in frozen water using spectroscopic observations. When NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft passed close enough to Europa in 1979, it took images of the moon and showed its unusually smooth surface.
The plumes from Europa were only more recently observed with the Hubble Space Telescope and some reanalysis of data from the Galileo spacecraft. In, researchers directly observed the first evidence of water plumes in Europa. The water, whether a spacecraft probes it as the now-defunctBecause Europa’s Ocean is shrouded in a thick layer of ice, it’s difficult to study what is underneath. Researchers can get around this by studying its plumes.
The team suspects that if bacteria are present in the oceans of these icy moons, they might rest towards the ocean's surface, similar to the types found on Earth's oceans. When the plumes shoot out into space, the cellular material would be in the ice grains within the plume, which the Europa Clipper could then pick up on.
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