Landing on Europa and then melting through the ice seems like an extremely complicated way of seeing if there is life on Europa.

If there really is an ocean with life under the ice, and the ice fractures and moves as much as it looks like it does, then some of the seawater should have made it up to the surface in frozen form. I would suggest instead of the sending a probe through the ice to first do a sample return of some ice, or analysis on site. Even better - deep impact worked fairly well, perhaps throwing an impactor at Europa and examining the ejecta? The only downfall of that I can think of is if there are intelligent beings in the oceans we might cause a few casualties, but we haven't proven life yet at all.

This was proposed back in 1997-98, and NASA had rejected it so far: Europa Ice Clipper. I do not know whether this proposal was re-submitted since then.

__________________
Fiction has to be plausible. Reality is under no such constraint.

True, but it's a lot cooler than... well, anything.

What may be more feasible, would be to find recent fractures where water may have erupted onto the surface and sample those areas to see what was brought up.

__________________
I'm not a scientist, but I play one on the internet.
http://www.rrac.org

Hard to argue with that one. It would be cooler. Just complicated.

That all depends on the terrain. One way or the other you are going to have to dump speed and burn your way down. So whether you have something that melts through the ice or skims atop it looking for life--you need a big payload.

I would rather melt than have a rover on the surface either sliding everywhere or freezing on the spot. Any lifeform would still be in a sheet of ice frozen hard as steel and buried by other layers.

After all, when was the last time you saw a tubeworm on the surface here?

You aren't saving anything.

If you want to find life--have a cryobot use glider tech and go directly to the smokers and image them and take samples.
It's the only way to be sure.

True, but if we could find the mix for life or simply intiguing chemical evidence in the ice atop it would better justify sending a more complicated (and therefore more prone to failure) mission.

Though true, that tubeworms don't wash up on shore here, plenty of other things do. If life has truly caught hold on europa its byproducts will be everywhere and it will find its way into every possible crag, if earth is truly an accurate model to go by.

I am thinking that a surface mission is actually MORE failure prone than something which sits there and melts to water, where you have unlimited freedom of movement.

Remember, submarine craft like gliders and missiles like the Tomahawk need LESS brains than the DARPA challenge, with all its CRAY-equipped Humvees and massively parallel Sport-Utes or whatever.

Something to remember. You will need nuclear power to do it right, correct?

Well now, one of the problems with JIMO is that we don't know how to put a very powerful nuclear reactor in the vacuum of space. If you have water--it can serve as a coolant--which means a more typical reactor might be used to carry heat away--otherwise it is your wheeled rover which melts into the ice and bogs down in slush dragging a huge array of radiators behind it.

And I think Europa out of range for Kemp's towing service. All four-wheelers are good for is getting you stuck further in the woods anyway.

Goldin goofed because he took the easy way out--and it bit us. He gave every NASA center make-work, but really got very little done.

Its like what Bill Cosby said--the effort some younger folks use to get out of work often proves more laborious and involved than just getting up--and taking out the trash--and being done with it.


Besides, the evidence for life is not just going to be on the surface--it will likely also be covered in ice flows brought up from above perhaps from vents with no life.

And all you have is a rover doing laps on a skating rink and best.

Give me an HLLV, and a good aquatic cryobot and we will find life for you. It doesn't need wheels and other things that will be a real pain.

If we are going to play with more Delta launched toys, its best to stay at home. It's no good for Europa.

Time to buckle down and get real.

Planetary scientist says: Focus on Europa
http://spaceflightnow.com/news/n0702/14europa/

realted thread
joint mission to Europa