Europa Clipper's Voyage to Jupiter's Ocean Moon

NASA's Curious Universe

Katie Konans

Science

4.5 • 1K Ratings

🗓️ 1 October 2024

⏱️ 36 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

As NASA’s Europa Clipper spacecraft leaves Earth, it carries a message: we, too, are made of water. Europa—one of Jupiter’s moons—is a top candidate to support life, thanks to its ocean of liquid, salty water capped by a layer of ice. Lynnae Quick-Henderson, a planetary scientist at NASA, explains how Clipper will search Europa for the building blocks of life. The mission is also a message in a bottle, bringing a greeting from one ocean world to another. Hear how Ada Limón, the Poet Laureate of the United States, used NASA’s mission as inspiration for her poem “In Praise of Mystery: A Poem for Europa” and why she thinks everyone—even space nerds—should step back and appreciate our connections to the universe and each other.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Arching under the night sky, inky with black expansiveness, a NASA probe is sailing to the outer solar system.
0:11.0	The mission is called Europa Clipper. Its target, Europa, is a moon of Jupiter just smaller than our own moon.
0:19.0	Europa is covered in a sheet of ice that is miles thick,
0:23.8	like something from a sci-fi movie.
0:26.9	If we were riding along with Europa Clipper,
0:29.9	at first glance, this moon would seem to have nothing in common with Earth.
0:34.5	You're far away and you see just this white globe of ice and as you get closer and closer and
0:40.3	closer, you see all of these fractures and furrows that are crisscrossing the surface.
0:45.3	And you notice that these fractures and furrows are this reddish brown color.
0:50.3	Linnae Quick Henderson is a planetary scientist at NASA who studies ocean worlds.
0:56.0	She spent a lot of time looking at Europa's surface.
1:00.0	For one, as you probably guessed from the ice, it is cold.
1:04.0	About minus 225 degrees Fahrenheit on what counts as a hot day.
1:10.0	And then there are those features that Linnae calls fractures and furrows.
1:15.1	They look like long scratches, almost like a giant dragged its fingernails across Europa's
1:21.1	surface.
1:23.1	Those are cracks in the ice.
1:25.2	I think about when these fractures are forming on the surface, does the surface
1:28.3	shape? Do we have Europa quakes? You know, we probably do. If you and I were standing on the
1:34.4	surface, sure, miraculously, and surviving, yeah. What would that be like? It would be frigid,
1:42.0	first of all. We'd have to have the heaviest winter coats that would ever exist.
1:47.1	But we'd see mountains. These ridges would look like that I'm talking about that look like
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