Photo: Europa Trek
Perhaps for the first time in the history of the world, our species has sent a mission dedicated to finding signs of life to a place other than planet Mars. The target of the ambitious Europe Clipper mission is one of Jupiter's nearly 100 ones, one of the largest.
The Moon is called Europa and over the years it has been a secondary target for several space missions, including the Voyager 2 probe and the Galileo orbiter. All of the previous spacecraft did not directly target the moon, but did look at it for a bit as they passed by.
Europa Clipper is different. This ship was built with a single purpose in mind, go out there and look at signs of life on the big ball of ice. That's because scientists believe under that thick crust of ice there is an ocean of water twice the volume of Earth's oceans combined. And where is water, there is a good chance there is also life as we know it.
NASA launched the mission on October 14 from Launch Pad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, but it'll be a very long time until the Clipper reaches Europa. Because it uses slingshot maneuvers with Earth and Mars at their center, the ship will take five and a half years to cover the 1.8 billion miles (2.9 billion km) distance that separates it from its target.
As with any space missions this long, public interest is likely to go down significantly in the coming months and years, despite the fact that NASA needs all the attention it can get. In a bid to keep people informed and interested in what's going on, it announced new capabilities for the Europa Trek web portal.
The tool has been up and running for a while now, giving all those interested the chance to explore the Jovian moon kind of in the same way as one can experience Mars through Mars Trek. However, the newly added features (NASA calls them enhancements) should bring a whole new experience to the table.
Live since September 30, the enhancements now allow people to fly over the moon's surface in an interactive fashion, thanks to the inclusion in the database of high-resolution images captured by the Voyager, Galileo, and Juno spacecraft.
There is now also a guided tour of the place's landforms, featuring commentary by people from the space agency's Astrobiology Science Communication Guild and Solar System Exploration Research Virtual Institute. The tour comes with data on the geology of the place and what it could mean from a biological standpoint.
As for the Europa Clipper, it and it alone will be able to confirm whether the place has life or not. The ship will conduct 49 close flybys (16 miles/25 km above the surface) when it reaches its target in April 2030, scanning the surface with radars, magnetometers, sensors, a thermal instrument, and a gravity experiment.
Europa Clipper is different. This ship was built with a single purpose in mind, go out there and look at signs of life on the big ball of ice. That's because scientists believe under that thick crust of ice there is an ocean of water twice the volume of Earth's oceans combined. And where is water, there is a good chance there is also life as we know it.
NASA launched the mission on October 14 from Launch Pad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, but it'll be a very long time until the Clipper reaches Europa. Because it uses slingshot maneuvers with Earth and Mars at their center, the ship will take five and a half years to cover the 1.8 billion miles (2.9 billion km) distance that separates it from its target.
As with any space missions this long, public interest is likely to go down significantly in the coming months and years, despite the fact that NASA needs all the attention it can get. In a bid to keep people informed and interested in what's going on, it announced new capabilities for the Europa Trek web portal.
The tool has been up and running for a while now, giving all those interested the chance to explore the Jovian moon kind of in the same way as one can experience Mars through Mars Trek. However, the newly added features (NASA calls them enhancements) should bring a whole new experience to the table.
Live since September 30, the enhancements now allow people to fly over the moon's surface in an interactive fashion, thanks to the inclusion in the database of high-resolution images captured by the Voyager, Galileo, and Juno spacecraft.
There is now also a guided tour of the place's landforms, featuring commentary by people from the space agency's Astrobiology Science Communication Guild and Solar System Exploration Research Virtual Institute. The tour comes with data on the geology of the place and what it could mean from a biological standpoint.
As for the Europa Clipper, it and it alone will be able to confirm whether the place has life or not. The ship will conduct 49 close flybys (16 miles/25 km above the surface) when it reaches its target in April 2030, scanning the surface with radars, magnetometers, sensors, a thermal instrument, and a gravity experiment.
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