Europa Lander

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Im Sommer hatte NASA ein 21-köpfiges Team zur Ausarbeitung eines Konzepts für eine Europa Lander Mission gebildet. Dieses Team hat jetzt einen ausführlichen Bericht fertiggestellt:

NASA Receives Science Report

Europa Lander SDT Report JPL D-97667

The Europa Lander mission concept is designed to achieve ground-breaking science. The SDT is confident that a payload matching or exceeding the requirements described herein could potentially reveal signs of life on Europa.

Der Bericht soll auch auf der Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (LPSC) im März in The Woodlands, Texas, und auf der Astrobiology Science Conference (AbSciCon) im April in Mesa, Arizona, vorgestellt und diskutiert werden.

NASA's plans to explore Europa and other "ocean worlds"

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SETI Institute
 

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NASA Tests Robotic Ice Tools

Since 2015, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, has been developing new technologies for use on future missions to ocean worlds. That includes a subsurface probe that could burrow through miles of ice, taking samples along the way ...

Brian Wilcox, an engineering fellow at JPL, designed a prototype inspired by so-called "melt probes" used here on Earth. Since the late 1960s, these probes have been used to melt through snow and ice to explore subsurface regions.

The problem is that they use heat inefficiently. Europa's crust could be 10 to 20 kilometers deep; a probe that doesn't manage its energy would cool down until it stopped frozen in the ice.

Wilcox innovated a different idea: a capsule insulated by a vacuum, the same way a thermos bottle is insulated. Instead of radiating heat outwards, it would retain energy from a chunk of heat-source plutonium as the probe sinks into the ice.

A rotating sawblade on the bottom of the probe would slowly turn and cut through the ice. As it does so, it would throw ice chips back into the probe's body, where they would be melted by the plutonium and pumped out behind it.

Removing the ice chips would ensure the probe drills steadily through the ice without blockages. The ice water could also be sampled and sent through a spool of aluminum tubing to a lander on the surface. Once there, the water samples could be checked for biosignature.


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