Dean chats with Dr. Erin Leonard, planetary geologist and project staff scientist for the Europa Clipper mission. What does it take to send a spacecraft to one of Jupiter's moons? And could there be liquid water waiting on the surface?
Send us your thoughts at lookingup@wvxu.org or post them on social media using #lookinguppodcast
Additional resources referenced in this episode:
- Jupiter's Moon Io Erupts
- New evidence of water plumes found on Jupiter's moon Europa
- Launch of NASA's Europa Clipper to Jupiter moon
- 2010 Odyssey - Jupiter Ignition
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:
Looking Up is transcribed using a combination of AI speech recognition and human editors. It may contain errors. Please check the corresponding audio before quoting in print.
Dean Regas: In the movie called 2010, based on the book by Arthur C. Clarke, a joint Russian American mission sends astronauts from a troubled Earth on a long mission to Jupiter. They're following a mysterious signal and discover something wonderful around a tiny moon called Europa. What's down there?
Probes fail, instruments fail, but something is down there on Europa. And, for those that saw the movie, you know there comes a warning, right, at the end from an unseen entity? All these worlds are yours, except Europa.
Now that's science fiction, but for most astronomers, Europa is the number one place in the solar system to look for life, right now.
So, what are we waiting for? Warning aside, let's go to Europa.
From the studios of Cincinnati Public Radio, I'm your host, Dean Regas, and this is Looking Up. The show that takes you deep into the cosmos or just to the telescope in your backyard to learn more about what makes this amazing universe of ours so great.
Today we're hitching a ride on the Europa Clipper mission, whose destination is the water world far from the sun.
Our guest and tour guide is Dr. Erin Leonard, planetary geologist, and project staff scientist for the Europa Clipper mission.
So, before we get to Europa, let's first talk about Jupiter. The planet 88,000 miles wide at the equator. That means you could line up about 11 earths from end to end. But Jupiter itself is not the place we want to be looking for life because it's all gases. It's majority of it is hydrogen and helium, and that's about it. There's not even a place you can stand on Jupiter, but its moons present some really fascinating features We're talking like dozens and dozens and dozens of moons, just a little under a hundred moons that have been found around Jupiter. And there's really cool ones, too.
Take, uh, Io. This is the closest big moon to,, Jupiter. And Io is covered in volcanoes. This is like a geologically active moon, the likes of which we have no other comparison in the solar system, Volcano is going off all the time, basically daily with giant pools of lava. and it's hot because of the tidal forces.
The, the tug of Jupiter's gravity is actually stretching out this moon. So, it's like if you take a rubber band and you stretch it back and forth really fast, it gets hot. That's what's happening to io, and the heat is just bursting out all over the place. That's not the place we want to look for life. We want to go a little farther away where there's still some of that tidal heat, but it's not creating, like, volcanoes all over the place.
And that's where we get to the moon Europa. And so, Europa is about the size of our moon, about 2, 000 miles across or so, and covered in ice. At first glance, it looks like this frozen, Kind of dead ice ball with these surface cracks on it. Some places where meteors slammed into the ice and broke through the surface.
And then also places where it looks like ice might be moving. It's not just frozen. And it's definitely not frozen solid. Something is moving underneath the ice. And so, the Galileo spacecraft was the first one that kind of got these really close up pictures of this.
And they saw that these cracks that were underneath the surface had this kind of pattern to them. The planetary scientists were looking at these and they're like, you know, this is tidal forces. This is things that are moving something liquid under the surface. It's not just some strange liquid. It's H2O, and it's in liquid form. That means not frozen, not gas. That means the temperature is hot enough for it to melt, not too cold to freeze. That's weird. That's really hard to find in our solar system.
So Europa, if the estimates are correct, has more liquid water in it then all the oceans of the earth combined and that's why we want to go check it out.
Well, Erin, thanks so much for joining me today.
Dr. Erin Leonard: Great. Thanks so much for having me.
Dean Regas: Well, now, uh, take me to launch day, you know, what does it like that day just before the launch of the Europa Clipper and the moments just after it clears the tower?
Dr. Erin Leonard: You know, I, I've gotten this question a couple of times and I still struggle with the words to describe it. It is like every emotion all at once, it's a little terrifying. It's, um, so spectacular. So amazing. So much, hope and joy. There's really just the whole spectrum of emotions going on.
So, I was at the Banana Creek viewing site. where a lot of the science team and engineering team was to watch the, the launch and, you know, you're sitting there with all of your colleagues who work on the mission and, it's such a great team experience and you're all feeling the same things as you're just watching the rocket on, on the launch pad and then counting down.
And then as, as it clears the tower, it's just, it, it's, It's, it's everything. It's, it's really, really like nothing else I've ever experienced.
Dean Regas: I can imagine you and a lot of people had a lot of sleepless nights ahead of this. I mean, cause this mission's been in the works for a very long time. What were some of the setbacks and challenges and what finally got this mission to reality?
Dr. Erin Leonard: Yeah, so I've been working on this mission now for about nine years. But there was a whole history even before that. A lot of different people in the community went through several different versions or concepts of, of different sorts of missions, all to go to Europa. And, you know, due to different budgetary reasons or, or other, reasons those earlier iterations were not, what we eventually ended up flying Europa Clipper and, and even after Europa Clipper became a mission in about 2015, that's when I sort of got involved.
Um, you know, there's always challenges when you're building a mission. Going to Europa is a challenging environment. It's been a long road and so that, that really just made it even more rewarding to watch the launch and, and to know that now that the spacecraft is where it belongs, space and, and that's where it was designed to be.
And so, we're all just so happy, that it's there and it's doing really well.
Dean Regas: Well, now comes the long wait, essentially, because now that it's up in orbit or it's up in space, it's on its way to the Jupiter system. What's the path that it's going to take to get there? And are there some potential hazards in route?
Dr. Erin Leonard: Yeah, so we don't go straight to Jupiter, uh, we do have quite a long cruise of about five and a half years. It's actually going to happen as we're on a, what we call a mega trajectory, a Mars Earth gravity assist. So, we actually go out to Mars, we kind of slingshot around Mars and then we can come back around Earth, slingshot back around Earth and then out to Jupiter.
And so that's why it takes five and a half years to get there. We don't. Have,, particularly a lot of hazards along the way. It's a pretty benign environment. Especially, uh, radiation wise. When we do get to Jupiter, we'll have about a six hour burn to essentially slow down, it was, we're burning the thrusters, we're slowing down to get into orbit around Jupiter. And I think that'll be a really, uh, fun and, um, intense, maneuver that the, that the spacecraft does.
Dean Regas: So, it's going to enter into an orbit, is it kind of a real close orbit to Europe or kind of an elongated one?
Dr. Erin Leonard: Yeah, so we're actually don't get into orbit around Europa, but we stay in orbit around Jupiter and we do these really long elliptical orbits around Jupiter, um, that have close flybys of Europa. But we stay in this long elliptical orbit around Jupiter, and that's primarily due to the really. intense radiation environment around right around Europa due to Jupiter's radiation belts. And so we don't want to be in orbit around Europa and stay in that really intense radiation environment all the time.
And so we do this. For Europa Clipper to essentially extend the lifetime of the mission, right?
If, if we were in orbit around Europa, we wouldn't be able to be there very long because, it's really hard to build a spacecraft that can survive that much intense radiation. But by. Being in these long elliptical orbits around Jupiter, we can perform a lot of flybys of Europa. So we get a really nice web of coverage and build up this global coverage of Europa while staying out of the really intense radiation environment for the most part.
And we get really close to Europa. Some of our closest flybys get down to 25 kilometers, which is really close to Europa.
Dean Regas: Wow, that is really close, given how far away that moon is, only, you know, 25 kilometers off.
And so what are the main goals of the mission? Are, are there things you hope to find, discover, or maybe some things to rule out?
Dr. Erin Leonard: Yeah, so the main goal of the Europa Clipper mission is to understand whether Europa, Europa's ocean in particular may be habitable, maybe a habitable environment.
And so we want to understand all aspects of that habitability, right? We, we think that life on earth originated at the bottom of earth's oceans at what we call mid ocean ridges, where there's heat, there's water, there's rock, and there's time and all of these ingredients were bubbling together.
We think that Europa's ocean, may also have these ingredients. It has a rocky core. Uh, we think there's a lot of heat generated through its orbit around Jupiter. It has an ocean composition that we think, Think is somewhat similar to earth's ocean.
So we think that Europa may have all of these ingredients needed to produce life in its subsurface ocean, but we really need a dedicated mission to understand that, to understand the conditions, uh, within Europa's ocean.
Dean Regas: I know this is going to be really tough to answer this, but perfect world, ideally, what in your wildest dreams do you hope Europa Clipper finds?
Dr. Erin Leonard: Oh man, it's, it's a good question. It's a common question. What I'm most looking forward to with Europa Clipper is really just the questions. That we don't even know to ask yet, right?
Like we think we understand some of these things about Europa, but we're going to discover so much with Europa Clipper. We're going to, we're going to get answers to questions we don't even know to ask yet. It's, it's going to be really, really great and really exciting.
You know, I am a planetary geologist, so I mostly study surfaces. So I'm most excited also for the images that we're going to return of Europa's surface and understanding how that surface can be so young. It's one of the youngest surfaces in our solar system, on average only about a hundred million years old.
And even Earth's surface is older than that at more like 200 to 300 million years old. And we think Earth has a really young surface. So really understanding how Europa's surface is so young, you know, what exactly are we going to find? I don't know, but it's going to be amazing.
Dean Regas: And I assume it's going to be quite a bit different than what Galileo, uh, the Galileo spacecraft found because it's been a number of years since that survey happened and the surface of Europa is changing even as we speak.
Dr. Erin Leonard: Potentially. Yes. That's definitely something we're going to be looking for with Europa Clipper. Change detection, right? Has Europa's surface changed over the past decades since we've really been there to study it with the Galileo spacecraft, so that's definitely something we'll be looking at.
We'll be looking for surface changes and either tectonic or even cryovolcanism potentially. And then we'll also be looking for activity like potentially plumes. Uh, you know, we have tantalizing evidence. That, that there could be plumes, on Europa from the Hubble Space Telescope, but those are only a couple of pixels. We're not really sure if it's noise, if it's, if it's real. But you're with Europa Clipper, we'll, we'll get a great grasp on that.
Dean Regas: Well, and then I got to ask, I know it barely left earth, but what future mission does this pave the way for?
What do we see next in the pipeline?
Dr. Erin Leonard: Yeah, I, I think it's never too early. Oh, good. Good. I was hoping I didn't ask.
You know, some of it does depend on what we find with Europa Clipper. Right. But especially if we go there with Clipper and if we find that environment is indeed habitable, then the next thing we're going to want to do very eagerly, right, is send something there. Send another spacecraft there to see if it is inhabited to see if there is life in Europa's ocean. And so that may take the form of something like a lander that digs into the subsurface or even something more like a melt probe that can melt through the ice shell and into the subsurface ocean.
And so there's a lot of different, um, early concepts out there right now, but definitely never too early to be thinking about something like that.
Dean Regas: Well, uh, Erin, thanks so much for talking to us about this today. This is such an awesome mission.
I've been following along for a long time. I'm excited to have it out and started. And now, yeah, I just got to wait five and a half more years. That's fine. We can do that. No problem.
Dr. Erin Leonard: Best thing comes to those who wait, right? So, yes, I think this is, like you said, a very exciting mission. I'll be right there, waiting with you for the next five and a half years, but it's, it's going to be so spectacular when it gets there that it will be worth the wait.
Dean Regas: So I know this mission just took off and I'm already asking Dr. Leonard from the Europa Clipper like what's gonna happen to five years What gets there? What's gonna happen after that? What's gonna happen after it finds this,
but I'm kind of buzzing with this stuff because this world is so unique.
she kind of hinted at this and mentioned that there are these really Encouraging signs from both the Galileo spacecraft in the Hubble Space Telescope that took some images of it And
Man, it sure looks like geysers are shooting right out of it. But I guess we can't confirm that yet until Europa Clipper gets there, but.
Yeah, look for those Hubble Telescope pictures of geysers on Europa because it certainly looks like it to me.
And so, this is maybe turning sci fi into reality, just like in the movie 2010. What really is next?
Let's say we find this giant ocean of water below the ice. How do we get to the water? How do we fly 400, 500 million miles with some kind of robotic drill? Drill through the probably miles and miles of ice, and then deposit a submarine to swim around, and then you have This robotic submarine sending you pictures from the oceans of Europa.
Is that too far-fetched to imagine happening in my lifetime? I mean, come on, come on guys, we can do this. We can definitely do this. And then, what's after that? How do we send some people there? And what will those people find?
Looking up with Dean Regas is a production of Cincinnati Public Radio. Kevin Reynolds and I created the podcast in 2017.
Ella Rowen and Marshall Verbsky produce and edit our show and are currently on assignment to watch the movie 2010 to find out more about Europa. I think you guys will like it. You know, it was made in 1984, so it's like retro futuristic.
Jenell Walton is our Vice President of Content, and Ronny Salerno is our Digital Platforms Manager.
Our theme song is Possible Light by Ziv Moran, and our cover art is by Nicole Tiffany. I'm Dean Regas. Keep looking up!
