31.10.2024

NASA spacecraft to Jupiter’s moon uses UT research to determine if it’s habitable

To determine if one of Jupiter’s moons is habitable, NASA launched a spacecraft called the Europa Clipper on Oct. 14, utilizing technology designed in the 1990s by researchers at the Jackson School of Geosciences. 

UT researchers initially developed Radar for Europa Assessment and Sounding: Ocean to Near-surface in 1998 to investigate the ice sheets in Antarctica. The radar is one of nine instruments aboard the Europa Clipper. This is the most expensive planetary mission by NASA on record, said lead REASON investigator Don Blankenship.

The instrument will help NASA look for the combination of water, organic compounds and energy that could hint at possible life beneath the barren ice shell. Life needs building blocks such as carbon, sulfur, nitrogen, oxygen and most importantly, time to develop. 

“All of those seem very promising for Europa, but one of the reasons that we need to have Europa Clipper is to go and quantify the likelihood for all of those different possibilities and try to assess if Europa is habitable,” said Krista Soderlund, research associate professor in the UT Institute for Geophysics, who joined the project over 10 years ago. 

In 1998, astronomers approached Blankenship astronomers about studying ice-covered oceans, resulting in him developing a prototype with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where he proposed a small mission to Europa. 

However, funding for the mission was not approved when they pitched it to Congress in 1999. Blankenship and his team spent the next 15 years researching Europa and conducting a sequence of five studies every three years. With the help of former U.S. Rep. John Culberson on the House Appropriations Committee, they received the funding for the mission in 2014, and the radar was officially selected to accompany the Europa Clipper for its 2024 launch. 

“It’s a $5 billion mission, and our radar was $300 million,” Blankenship said. “So we were a small fraction, but we had to defend our radar in the context of this mission. … The politics of convincing everyone that it’s worth expending those resources are monumental.”

For Soderlund, Blankenship and Natalie Wolfenbarger, a postdoctoral associate at Stanford who worked on REASON, the experience of watching their decade-long work finally launch into space was life changing. 

“The underlying terror that something could go wrong as you watch it going further and further up in the sky until you can’t see it anymore — those feelings move from terror to this joy and excitement and anticipation for the next phases,” Wolfenbarger said.

Quelle: The University of Texas at Austin