If life exists elsewhere in our solar system, Jupiter’s large icy moons are a pretty good bet on where to find it.
Scientists believe vast oceans lurk within, kept liquid by the jostling from Jupiter’s immense gravitational field and protected from the planet’s harsh radiation belts by thick ice sheets. “What we’ve learned on Earth is where you find water, you quite often find life,” says Mark Fox-Powell from the Open University in England. “When we look out in the solar system, places that have [liquid] water in the present day are really restricted to Earth, and the moons of Jupiter and Saturn.” That latter planet and its satellites, studied in detail by NASA and the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Cassini-Huygens mission from 2004 to 2017, still holds secrets that scientists will one day probe. For now, all eyes are on Jupiter.
The mission to visit our solar system’s largest planet will be ESA’s JUICE spacecraft—the Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer. Now undergoing testing in France, the six-ton spacecraft will soon be shipped to French Guiana in South America for its launch this April on a European Ariane 5 rocket. JUICE will take eight years to reach Jupiter, saving fuel along the way by using gravitational assists from Earth, Venus and Mars. On its arrival in July 2031, the solar-powered spacecraft will focus its 10 science instruments on three of the four largest Jovian moons—Europa, Ganymede and Callisto—all thought to harbor subsurface oceans. Ganymede—the solar system’s largest moon—will receive most of JUICE’s attention, however. After its initial reconnaissance, the spacecraft will enter orbit there in 2034. “We’re trying to characterize what the habitability of Ganymede might be,” says Emma Bunce at the University of Leicester in England, part of the JUICE team.
To read more, click here.