Originally Posted by Darrrius

Hi

I agree that a mission to Europa should be a high priority.

However in my opinion, it will be at least 50 years before a mission is developed that will search for life in any subsurface ocean.

Before this mission is developed, there will need to be scouting missions to first confirm the existence of a subsurface ocean, and to probe the thickness of the ice to find a suitable place for any lander to do science.

As for breaking through the ice and exploring any subsurface ocean - I'd say thats about 50 yrs away.

Originally Posted by tusenfem

Here is some update.

There is a project called Laplace for which a proposal has been send to the ESA for funding. This projects seeks to be a collaboration between ESA, NASA and JAXA, and should consist of 3 spacecraft going to the Jovian system. Planned are:

1. An Jupiter orbiting spacecraft, made by the europeans, which at the end of its mission will turn into a Ganymede orbiter (IMHO Ganymede is much more interesting than Europa in a scientific point of view, but that as an aside)
2. A Europa orbiter, made by the americans, which will traverse the Jovian system 1 or 2 years, to lose velocity and obtain a favourable orbit to get "captured" by Europa in a polar orbit. After that, because of the high radiation environment, the spacecraft was planned to work for only 60 more days, but this might be extended to 90 days.
3. A third long orbit (I think) spacecraft made by the japanese, to have measurements at multiple points in the Jovian magnetosphere.

Now, the decision between Laplace and its competition mission Tandem (Saturn, Titan, Enceladus) will be made at the end of september, beginning of october. Then, if it passes, it will get into competition with the astrophysics project that will be chosen for the final round. So nothing definite yet.

Naturally, it may be that, if Laplace does not get through, NASA may decide to do the Europa orbiter by themselves (as it would be launched separately anyway, only the European and Japanese spacecraft will be launched together). I have no info on that, and I do not think they will come out with any statement about this before Laplace has been decided. That would not be useful for the cause.

Now, the russians were also interested in maybe building a lander for Europa. However, I do not think that they had a melting probe planned (there are a lot of questions about a melting probe, how it will function, forward contamination, etc.).

so, that is where it stands at the moment. Launch date for Laplace would be earliest 2019.