Europe and Enceladus are two ocean men that scientists have concluded to have liquid water oceans under their outer icy shells. The Europa Clipper mission should reach Europe around April 2030. If it collects data that indicate the potential habitability of the moon, robot -like land manissions can be the only way to confirm whether there is really life in it or not.
In order for these land missions to take place, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory Team of NASA has worked on a robot that can handle the search for life and has already tested it on the Matanuska glacier in Alaska. “At the moment this is a pretty mature concept,” says Kevin Hand, a planetary scientist at JPL who led this effort.
In the unknown
There are only a few things that we know for sure about the circumstances on the surface of Europe, and almost all of them do not predict well for land mans. Firstly, Europe is exposed to very hard radiation, which is a problem for electronics. The window of visibility and a potential robotlander can contact the Earth-Care for less than half of the 85 hours that the Moon needs to complete his day-night cycle because of the Europe-Jupiter Orbit. So, for more than half of the mission, the robot should take care of itself, without human soil teams to get it out of trouble. The lander should also run on non-rechargeable batteries, because the enormous distance to the sun would make solar panels unaffordable.
And that is just the beginning. Unlike Mars, we have no permanent job around Europe that can offer a communication infrastructure, and we have no high-rise images of the surface, which would make the landing particularly difficult. “We do not know what the surface of Europe looks like in the centimeter to the meter scale. Even with the Europa Clipper images, the highest resolution will be about half a meter per pixel in a few selected regions,” Hand explains.
