Charles Elachi says finding life beyond Earth would be “the discovery of the millennium,” if not the most dramatic “in all our human history.” Yet after more than 50 years of exploring space, mankind is still alone in the universe, as far as we know. Now, building on deep-space discoveries Elachi and his colleagues at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) have made, and on what can only be called the obsession of a powerful member of the U.S. Congress, engineers and scientists are beginning to plan a program of robotic exploration over the next two decades to look for life on the moons of Jupiter and Saturn.
The goal is to explore the oceans that robotic space probes have found on three of those moons, in the belief that life could have evolved there. Europa, the large icy moon of Jupiter imaged by the Galileo probe and the two Voyagers, is first on the list, largely because Rep. John Culberson (R-Texas), chairman of the appropriations subcommittee that funds NASA, really wants to go there.
“I’ve made it mandatory,” Culberson says, and he is putting taxpayer’s money where his mouth is.
To read more, click here.