NASA Details Plan To Send Lander To Europa To Look For Biological Signatures

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In 2015, NASA revealed its plans to send a spacecraft to conduct several close flybys of Europa sometime in the 2020s. Now, the space agency has detailed — in a Science Definition Team (SDT) report — a mission to send a lander to the icy moon.

The 264-page report, which can be accessed here, lists out three key science goals for a future lander mission — searching for life on the moon, assessing its habitability by analyzing material from the surface, and characterizing Europa’s surface and subsurface to support future robotic missions.

http://www.ibtimes.com/life-europa-nasa-details-plan-send-lander-jovian-moon-look-biological-signatures-2489567

Here's the report itself.

http://solarsystem.nasa.gov/docs/Europa_Lander_SDT_Report_2016.pdf

 

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NASA’S EUROPA LANDER MAY BE IN JEOPARDY AFTER THE MIDTERMS — AND SOME ARE FINE WITH SEEING IT GO

Now that Culberson is about to leave public office, the Europa lander will no longer have its champion, making its future at NASA uncertain. NASA never formally requested a lander for Europa, and the president’s latest budget request noted that the administration had no intention of funding such a program. No other lawmaker seems to be as passionate about the project, nor in the same position to keep the program alive.

The Europa lander, on the other hand, was not included as a top priority in the decadal survey. “That’s why the lander is in a much more uncertain position when Culberson leaves Congress,” says Dreier. “Because you don’t have any sort of institutionalized support for the concept.” And while most scientists agree that sending a lander to touch down on Europa’s surface is crucially important, some think that it’s too soon to start designing such a vehicle now. Even though we’ve sent a few spacecraft near the vicinity of Europa, we still don’t have detailed high-resolution imagery of the surface nor do we have much data from the space environment around the Moon. And it’s hard to design a lander for a terrain and environment you don’t know that well. “I actually put in a proposal for a potential instrument to be on the lander, and I struggled with writing a proposal because we have so many unknowns,” says Yingst.

Still, 2018 isn’t over yet. Culberson is still in office and it’s possible he could negotiate some last-ditch funding for the Europa projects before the end of the year. NASA is being funded through a continuing resolution that lasts until December 7th. It all depends if lawmakers can come to an agreement in the next few months on how funds should be appropriated for fiscal year 2019. But once Culberson leaves, it seems likely the funding for the Europa lander will dry up — and that could mean more waiting before we ever touch down on the mysterious moon’s icy exterior. “This is part of the deal of doing science in a democracy,” says Yingst.