Europa Mission Moves into Formulation — Might ESA Provide a Lander?

A mission to send a spacecraft to explore Jupiter’s moon Europa that owes its existence to an alliance between a few planetary scientists and Washington politicians moved from concept review to formulation today, the first step in the development phase.  NASA continues to say it will be launched “in the 2020s” while its political patrons are intent on 2022.

NASA Science Mission Directorate head John Grunsfeld announced that “Today we are taking an exciting step from concept to mission, in our quest to find signs of life beyond Earth.” 

On May 26, NASA announced the instruments that will be included on the spacecraft.  The goal is to determine if the moon is habitable — not whether life exists there, but whether the conditions that would allow life to develop exist.  Europa project scientist Curt Neibur said at the time that “we don’t have a life detector” and there is not even a scientific consensus on what to measure in order to detect life confidently.

A mission to Europa was the second priority for a flagship planetary
science mission in the most recent National Research Council (NRC)
Decadal Survey on planetary science.   Returning samples
from the surface of Mars got top billing, in part because of the high
cost of a Europa mission, then estimated at $4.7 billion.   The
report recommended that Europa advocates downsize the mission to make
it more affordable, yielding the “Europa Clipper” concept now being used
as the baseline design. That design involves a spacecraft that will orbit Jupiter and make 45 flybys of Europa over two-and-a-half years. 

Some Europa enthusiasts want to send a lander as well as an orbiter. 

The European Space Agency (ESA) built the Huygens spacecraft that traveled with the U.S. Cassini mission to Saturn and landed on its moon Titan.  ESA also built the Philae spacecraft that traveled with ESA’s Rosetta mission to Comet 67P/Churuymov-Gerasimenko and landed on the comet last November.  Philae just awakened from 7 months of hibernation and resumed communicating with Earth via Rosetta, which remains in orbit around the comet. 

Following on those successes, the idea of ESA providing a Europa lander as part of this mission has been getting some attention. During a press conference Monday at the Paris Air Show, outgoing ESA Director General (DG) Jean-Jacques Dordain and incoming DG Johann-Dietrich Woerner were asked about that possibility.  Dordain laughingly replied that he already told NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden that he would never let the United States land on Europa without Europe.  More seriously, he and Woerner said it was something that would have to be discussed.  ESA is already building its own orbiting mission to Jupiter’s moons — the Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (JUICE) — that will focus on two different moons, Ganymede and Callisto, and make only two flybys of Europa.

For now, however, the Europa Clipper orbiter is the NASA reference design and that is what moved into formulation today.

NASA had not planned on building a Europa mission now.  The Decadal Survey’s top priority was a series of missions to Mars that would eventually lead to returning a sample of Mars to Earth.  That “campaign,” which was conceived as a joint NASA-ESA effort, fell victim to budget constraints.  NASA instead is building a single spacecraft, Mars 2020, using hardware left over from the Mars Science Laboratory/Curiosity mission.  Obtaining funding for another expensive planetary science mission did not appear possible.

Two influential members of Congress have other ideas, however.   Rep. John Culberson (R-TX) and Adam Schiff (D-CA) used their positions on the House Appropriations Commerce-Justice-Science subcommittee to add funding for a Europa mission in FY2013 ($75 million; none was requested), FY2014 ($80 million; none was requested), and FY2015 ($100 million, compared to the $15 million requested).  Culberson now chairs that subcommittee and the House-passed version of the FY2016 CJS appropriations bill provides $140 million for Europa, an increase of $110 million above the request of $30 million. Schiff no longer is on the House Appropriations Committee, but the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) is in his district and he remains a strong supporter.  Culberson’s interest appears to be personal rather than constituent-based and he is an ardent advocate of the mission.  He repeatedly asserts that he is confident life will be discovered on Europa and he wants to be part of making that possible.

The Senate Appropriations Committee did not add any funding for Europa in approving its version of the FY2016 CJS bill, but both sides of Capitol Hill agree that the spacecraft should be launched using NASA’s new big rocket, the Space Launch System (SLS), which is now in development.  The House-passed bill specifies that the launch should take place in 2022.

NASA officials warn that they cannot efficiently proceed with a mission that is funded by annual congressional earmarks hoping each year that the money will be provided instead of through the regular budget planning process that requires Administration support.   The Obama Administration did request $30 million for Europa mission formulation in FY2016, however, and that is the step that began today even though the FY2016 appropriations process is far from complete.

Europa stirs fascination because observations from an earlier NASA mission to Jupiter, Galileo, indicated that a liquid ocean lies beneath Europa’s icy crust.  Other observations using the Hubble Space Telescope have more recently revealed plumes of material being ejected from Europa. One goal of the Europa mission is to study the material in the plumes as it flies close to the moon.  Instruments on the spacecraft will be able to analyze the material and determine what lies beneath the crust.  Niebur stressed at the May 26 briefing that the flyby mission would be able to reveal Europa’s secrets without touching the surface “just as a doctor can see what’s going on inside your body using an MRI.”