Jupiter's icy moon Europa is a prime target for future space missions as it harbours a buried ocean that could have the right conditions for life. But attempts to land may face a major hazard: jagged "blades" of ice up to 10m long. A major US conference has heard the moon may have ideal conditions for icy spikes called "penitentes" to form. Read more
Proposed Mission to Jupiter System Achieves Milestone
With input from scientists around the world, American and European scientists working on the potential next new mission to the Jupiter system have articulated their joint vision for the Europa Jupiter System Mission. The mission is a proposed partnership between NASA and the European Space Agency. The scientists on the joint NASA-ESA definition team agreed that the overarching science theme for the Europa Jupiter System Mission will be "the emergence of habitable worlds around gas giants." The proposed Europa Jupiter System Mission would provide orbiters around two of Jupiter's moons: a NASA orbiter around Europa called the Jupiter Europa Orbiter, and an ESA orbiter around Ganymede called the Jupiter Ganymede Orbiter. Read more
Hunting off-world sea life If life is to be found beyond our home planet, then our closest encounters with it may come in the dark abyss of some extraterrestrial sea. For Earth is certainly not the only ocean-girdled world in our solar system. As many as five moons of Jupiter and Saturn are now thought to hide seas beneath their icy crusts. To find out more about these worlds and their hidden oceans, two ambitious voyages are now taking shape. About a decade from now, if all goes to plan, the first mission will send a pair of probes to explore Jupiter's satellites. They will concentrate on giant Ganymede and pale Europa, gauging the depths of the oceans that almost certainly lie within them.
Landing sites on Europa identified A rigorous analysis of the jagged terrain of Jupiter's moon Europa is helping to identify safe landing strips for future missions. Europa is thought to have an ocean of water beneath its icy shell. The latest study is the first to use images from the Galileo spacecraft, which orbited Jupiter from 1995 to 2003, to generate measurements of Europa's slopes.
NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) have chosen Jupiter's moons as the destination for their upcoming joint outer planet flagship mission. A trip to Saturn's moon Titan needs further study, the agencies decided. The Europa Jupiter System Mission will launch two orbiters, one built by NASA and the other by the ESA, in 2020, with a scheduled arrival time in the Jupiter system of 2026.
Nasa and the European Space Agency have decided to forge ahead with an ambitious plan to send a probe to the Jupiter system and its icy moon Europa. The proposal could be the agencies' next "flagship" endeavour, to follow on from the successful Cassini-Huygens mission to the Saturn system.
At a meeting in Washington last week, National Aeronautics and Space Administration and European Space Agency officials decided to continue pursuing studies of a mission to Jupiter and its four largest moons, and to plan for another potential mission to visit Saturn's largest moon Titan and Enceladus. Both of these proposed missions are grand endeavours that set the stage for future planetary science research. These outer planet flagship missions could eventually answer questions about how our solar system formed and whether life exists elsewhere in the universe.
Ambitious plans to send probes to the outer planets are being considered by US and European space officials. One proposal envisages sending an orbiter to Saturn which would also drop a lander and a balloon on to the haze-shrouded moon Titan. The other sees two separate orbiters despatched to investigate Jupiter and its icy moons - Europa and Ganymede. Space agency officials will meet next week to decide which of the two plans should go forward for further study.