Fiscal yr 2015 NASA budget includes robotic mission to Jupiter's watery moon Europa, that could take place by 2025

By ELLIE ZOLFAGHARIFARD
DAILYMAIL
March 5, 2014

2015 NASA budget in brief:
--2015 space budget remains essentially flat at $17.5 billion
--$15 million has been set aside to plan a mission to Europa
--Agency could have $1.1 billion for commercial flights to ISS
--Budget has $2.8 billion for rockets to launch manned missions
--James Webb Space Telescope, a successor to Hubble, will launch in 2018
--Budget also includes funds for a new telescope to probe dark energy
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A daring robotic mission to Jupiter's watery moon Europa could take place by 2025.

...The space agency has set aside $15 million in its budget proposal to start planning some kind of mission to Europa. Nasa is making preparations to plan a robotic mission to Jupiter's watery moon Europa, a place where astronomers speculate there might be life

Nasa is making preparations to plan a robotic mission to Jupiter's watery moon Europa, a place where astronomers speculate there might be life, credit: AP

Nasa’s chief financial officer Elizabeth Robinson said the high radiation environment around Jupiter and distance from Earth would be a challenge. When Nasa sent Galileo to Jupiter in 1989, it took the spacecraft six years to get to the fifth planet from the sun. Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute astronomer Laurie Leshin said it could be ‘a daring mission to an extremely compelling object in our solar system.’ Past Nasa probes have flown by Europa, especially Galileo, but none have concentrated on the moon, one of dozens orbiting Jupiter.

Astronomers have long lobbied for a mission to Europa, but proposals would have cost billions of dollars. Last year, scientists discovered liquid plumes of water shooting up through Europa's ice. Flying through those watery jets could make Europa cheaper to explore than just circling it or landing on the ice, said Nasa Europa scientist Robert Pappalardo.

Nasa will look at many competing ideas for a Europa mission, so the agency doesn't know how big or how much it will cost, Dr Robinson said. She said a major mission goal would be searching for life in the strange liquid water under the ice-covered surface. Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb said going to Europa would be more exciting than exploring dry Mars.
‘There might be fish under the ice,’ he said...

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Behold the rings of Jupiter - that's right, we said Jupiter!

By EDDIE WRENN
DAILY MAIL
June 22, 2012

It is probably one of the least-known facts of our solar system - but Jupiter has a ring system.

Yes, the giant gas planet, the biggest planet in our system, has rings, which were first discovered in 1979 by the passing Voyager 1 spacecraft - which, 33 years later, is making its own voyage of discovery on the very edge of the solar system.

Data from the Galileo spacecraft that orbited Jupiter from 1995 to 2003 later confirmed that these rings were created by meteoroid impacts on small nearby moons.

As a small meteoroid strikes tiny Adrastea, for example, it will bore into the moon, vaporise and explode dirt and dust off into a Jovian orbit.

This is it: The rings are shown in profile, created by small meteorite impacts on the moons of Jupiter. Image credit: NASA

Pictured above is an eclipse of the sun by Jupiter, as viewed from Galileo. Small dust particles high in Jupiter's atmosphere, as well as the dust particles that compose the rings, can be seen by reflected sunlight.

The rings are not as well-known as Saturn and Uranus, partly because not many photographs of them exist.

The system is mainly composed of dust - caused by the collisions of meteorites on Jupiter's moons, and dust escaping from one of Jupiter's 60-plus moons, and the rings are probably as old as Jupiter.

Intriguingly, one of the moons of Jupiter, called S/2000 and about four kilometres in diameter, appears to have gone missing since it was first spotted in 2000. It is possible it crashed into a larger moon Himalia at 170 kilometres in diameter, and may have created its own ring.

The moons of Jupiter, with the rings circling in the same plane. Image credit: NASA