NASA’s Europa Clipper heads to Jupiter’s moon, UO professor helped develop tools onboard

It was the start of a 1.8-billion-mile, five-and-a-half-year journey. NASA’s "Europa Clipper" took off Monday from the Kennedy Space Center.

The probe is headed for its namesake, Jupiter’s Europa moon, with the hope of finding an ocean underneath its icy exterior.

Dr. Gerald (Wes) Patterson, a planetary geologist and a co-investigator on the EIS and REASON instruments on the NASA Europa Clipper mission says the "Europa clipper mission is going to go to Europa with state-of-the-art instrumentation to try and revisit places we have seen before with other spacecraft and get new data at much higher resolution, both exploring the surface and the subsurface to try and understand Europa better."

University of Oregon Professor and Planetologist, Carol Paty, helped develop two of the nine tools the probe will use to complete its mission.

The 100-foot spacecraft, the largest ever built for a planetary mission, is not expected to land on Europa.

Instead, it will do 49 "Flybys" that scientists hope will reveal whether the moon could be habitable.

"But what’s really unique about Europa is that the ocean is more than 100 kilometers deep, much deeper than anything we’ve ever known here on Earth. And it’s completely covered by an ice shell that’s up to tens of kilometers thick. So that’s very foreign to us," Patterson says

"The thickness of the ice matters. We don’t have the capability to drill through 30 kilometers of ice. Do we have the capability to drill through five kilometers of ice? We might," Paty said. "If that’s the case, the mission will open a new door of possibility."

https://katu.com/news/local/nasas-europa-clipper-heads-to-jupiters-moon-uo-professor-helped-develop-tools-onboard

_______________
Stay up to date with our social media:

KATU on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/katunews
KATU on Twitter: https://twitter.com/KATUNews
Subscribe to KATU on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmDTerxNU_gvCWLkIPkqghA/?sub_confirmation=1

Daily News Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLFtHM_AbvnEUkd_YRTlZpGKkbczT5w062

For more information, visit https://katu.com/

Have a news tip? Send it directly to us:

Email us: newstips@katu.com
Call the Newsroom: 503.231.4222

KATU is a OR based station and a ABC Television affiliate owned and operated by Sinclair Broadcast Group. Sinclair Broadcast Group, Inc. is one of the largest and most diversified television broadcasting companies in the country today.

#KATU #Katu2abc #Portland #Oregon #localnews #oregonnews

Author: KATU News
Go to Source

News post in at: October 16, 2024, 3:03 am.

Visit Our Sponsor’s:
News.Science – News Science