Europa Clipper Astrobiology Mission: How REASON Will Penetrate Europa’s Surface
Europa Clipper will carry an instrument called the Radar for Europa Assessment and Sounding: Ocean to Near-surface (REASON) that can penetrate beneath the Jovian moon’s surface layer, revealing potential pockets of water, cracks, or other features not visible from the outside.
Europa Clipper’s three main science objectives are to determine the thickness of the moon’s icy shell and its interactions with the ocean below, to investigate its composition, and to characterize its geology. The mission’s detailed exploration of Europa will help scientists better understand the astrobiological potential for habitable worlds beyond our planet.
Managed by Caltech in Pasadena, California, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory leads the development of the Europa Clipper mission in partnership with APL for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. APL designed the main spacecraft body in collaboration with JPL and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, and Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia. The Planetary Missions Program Office at Marshall executes program management of the Europa Clipper mission.
NASA’s Launch Services Program, based at Kennedy, manages the launch service for the Europa Clipper spacecraft, which will launch on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket from Launch Complex 39A at Kennedy.
Europa Clipper: Radar for Europa Assessment and Sounding: Ocean to Near-Surface (REASON) (earlier post)
The Radar for Europa Assessment and Sounding: Ocean to Near-surface (REASON) is a dual-frequency ice-penetrating radar (9 and 60 MHz) onboard the Europa Clipper mission. REASON is designed to probe Europa from exosphere to subsurface ocean, contributing the third dimension to observations of this enigmatic world.
The hypotheses REASON will test are that (1) the ice shell of Europa hosts liquid water, (2) the ice shell overlies an ocean and is subject to tidal flexing, and (3) the exosphere, near-surface, ice shell, and ocean participate in material exchange essential to the habitability of this moon.
Astrobiology,
