UT Austin to visit Europa in search of alien life

AUSTIN (KXAN) — A cloud billowed beneath the SpaceX rocket as it pulled away from the launch pad at Kennedy Space Center on Monday, Oct. 15. Escaping Earth’s gravitational pull, the rocket carried with it the hope of finding alien life in our solar system.

Europa Clipper will reach the orbit of Jupiter’s moon in late spring/early summer of 2030. The spacecraft, the largest NASA has ever built for a visit to another planet, will study the ocean world. It will fly past the moon 49 times, scanning the seas beneath its icy shell in the process.

How will they do this? Using technology developed at the University of Texas.

REASON (Radar for Europa Assessment and Sounding: Ocean to Near-surface) was designed by researchers at UT Austin. The radar will scan the moon for water, organic compounds, and energy that could support life.

“Our radar is designed to test the hypothesis for how the stuff at the surface gets to the ocean, and how the stuff in the ocean gets to the surface,” said Don Blankenship , a senior research scientist at UT’s Institute for Geophysics, said back in 2023.

Europa Clipper and the University of Texas

Blankenship was approached by NASA in 1998 to develop REASON. His team used techniques originally developed to study the ocean beneath Antarctica to design REASON for the Europa Clipper mission.

“UT’s role in this incredible flagship NASA mission builds on over a decade of expertise in the science and engineering of radar instruments and the sensing of ice sheets and sub-ice environments on Earth, Mars and now Europa,” said Demian Saffer, director of the UT’s Institute of Geophysics in a statement.

REASON is one of nine instruments aboard Europa Clipper. The others will study moon dust, Europa’s atmosphere and its magnetic field.

What’s the deal with Europa?

According to NASA, Europa is about the size of Earth’s moon but is built very differently. During the Galileo mission in the 1990s, scientists found evidence that Europa had a salty ocean with “more water than all of Earth’s oceans combined.”

This, plus signs of organic compounds and energy in the ocean, led scientists to believe the moon could support life.

Aboard Clipper is the MISE, or Mapping Imaging Spectrometer for Europa, an image-capturing device that sees in the infrared allowing it to identify atoms.

The spacecraft also carries the E-THEMIS (Europa Thermal Emissions Imaging System) which can identify hot spots that could transport nutrients across the world.

Jupiter is highly radioactive, it has a magnetic field 20,000 times stronger than the Earth’s. The ice around Europa could protect life beneath the surface.

Jupiter is 480 million miles from the Earth. Europa Clipper will fire its rockets in five and a half years so that it can slow down and enter the moon’s orbit.

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