In 2015, Bill Nye was on Marine One with President Obama.
The television personality and science advocate was officially there for an Earth Day event, but took the opportunity to speak with the president about space exploration, and specifically, a mission still in its infancy at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory of NASA in La Cañada Flintridge that desperately needed funds.
After a decade of promotion by scientists, the mission is expected to launch on Friday and will investigate Jupiter's icy moon Europa, which is suspected of harboring a vast ocean capable of supporting life.
“There are two questions: Where do we come from? And are we alone in the universe? Nye said. “If you know someone who says they never ask those questions, they're not being honest with you.”
Designed by JPL, the $5 billion Europa Clipper spacecraft is the largest interplanetary probe ever built by the space agency. The probe will launch on a SpaceX rocket, built in Hawthorne.
“If we find life on another world, it will change life on this one,” Nye said. “It is the people who live and work in Los Angeles County who do this work that will potentially change the course of human history.”
Following in the footsteps of the James Webb Space Telescope and the Perseverance Mars Rover, Clipper is one of the latest multibillion-dollar “flagship” projects to advance development this decade, as NASA faces budget adjustments and project management issues.
“I often speak of these missions as modern cathedrals. “They are generational missions,” said NASA JPL Director Laurie Leshin at a press conference to mark the launch of the Clipper. “I'm really proud that as humanity we decided to undertake these difficult, long-term goals, like exploring the unknown on Jupiter.”
NASA has until November 6 to launch the probe and is currently waiting for Hurricane Milton to pass over Florida's Space Coast.
Once the spacecraft leaves its launch pad at Cape Canaveral, it begins a five-and-a-half-year odyssey: first orbiting Mars in early 2025 and then circling Earth in late 2026 before accelerating toward the planet closer. largest of the solar system. planet and an incredibly dynamic moon.
Europa orbits Jupiter in just three and a half days, traveling 10 times faster than our moon. The gas giant's intense gravitational forces constantly crush and strain the moon's core, heating it.
Scientists believe hydrothermal water vents push heat from the core upward, melting an expansive ocean that sloshes about 15 miles beneath the moon's icy crust, much deeper than humans have ever dug into the moon. Land.
Observations from Earth and orbiting probes suggest that some of this water flows through cracks in the ice and explodes into geysers more than a hundred miles high.
With liquid water and a source of energy in the form of heat, Europa has fascinated scientists for decades. If it also hosts organic compounds such as amino acids, which make up the proteins that make up cells, then Europa could host extraterrestrial life forms.
Clipper will look for luminous signatures of these compounds on Europa and any that may be launched into space by meteorites or geysers.
“If there is anything alive (imagine a European microbe, much less European fish), these things would be launched into space,” Nye said. “If you sample water in any pond anywhere on Earth, anywhere there is moisture, you will find all these viruses, bacteria and microbes, in small sizes, so it stands to reason that we would at least find organic compounds.”
(NASA is virtually certain it won't find fish, but that hasn't stopped scientists from dreaming.)
Although previous missions to Jupiter have provided scientists with a sketch of the moon, Clipper will help paint a detailed portrait.
Once Clipper reaches Jupiter, it will orbit the gas giant 80 times over the course of four years, performing 49 flybys of Europa, just 16 miles from the surface, to collect pole-to-pole data.
In their first flybys, scientists should be able to confirm the existence of the ocean, all by reading the magnetic field produced by the moon and measuring its gravity to determine how much it attracts the spacecraft.
They will also get some of the highest resolution images ever taken of the moon and the first readings of what molecules are near the surface.
For the remainder of the mission, Clipper will study the complex dynamics of how the ocean interacts with the icy crust and heated mantle beneath. This will slowly appear as the probe uses penetrating radio waves to look beneath the icy crust, much like an X-ray machine.
“Clipper will be the first in-depth mission that will allow us to characterize the habitability of what could be the most common type of inhabited world in our universe,” said Gina Dibraccio, acting director of the Planetary Sciences Division at NASA Headquarters. at a press conference. press conference.
On September 3, 2034, Europa Clipper will intentionally crash into Jupiter's rocky moon Ganymede, ensuring the spacecraft doesn't accidentally collide with one of the planet's most scientifically interesting moons.
That is, unless NASA decides to extend the mission, which has happened frequently in the past.
Clipper is not the first mission to explore the icy moon. The Galileo probe passed by in the 1990s, confirming scientists' initial hopes that the Moon was more than just a quiet rocky ball orbiting the Earth.
The enthusiasm led scientists to formally request a dedicated mission to Europa from NASA in the early 2000s.
But NASA always has to weigh the potential scientific discoveries of bold flagship missions against the risk of cost overruns, and back then, the agency balked.
In 2013, NASA had just finished dealing with cost overruns for the Curiosity Mars Rover and the agency was focused on getting the James Webb Space Telescope into space. All this while Congress had cut its budget for planetary science almost in half compared to the previous decade.
Then, the scientist got involved.
“We realized that this [mission] “This would be possible 10 years ago at the Planetary Society,” Nye said, “and so we got to work: 'Everyone look, write letters, write emails, talk to your congressmen, come to our action days.'” .
The Planetary Society, a Pasadena-based nonprofit of which Nye is the executive director and a longtime member, decided to support a mission to Europe. Its leaders testified before Congress and spoke on Capitol Hill. Planetary Society members wrote more than 375,000 messages of support to Congress and the White House.
In 2014, the agency explicitly told scientists and Congress that it would not fund a mission to Europe. in your quote request.
“That never happens,” said Casey Dreier, head of space policy at the Planetary Society. “They never just submit a budget request saying, 'We're not going to do something.' There is no money. Basically, stop asking.'”
But the following year, NASA asked Congress for $15 million to begin the multimillion-dollar research. A Texas congressman who was an advocate for space funding (and also had power in the budget process) decided to give the agency $100 million.
NASA selected JPL to design and build the spacecraft.
“It's not too surprising to see JPL win a contract for a planetary mission,” said Matthew Shindell, curator of planetary science and exploration at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum.
“They really have an incredible track record,” he said. “Therefore, they are one of NASA's most trusted centers when it comes to developing large robotic missions.”
Today, with inflation further flattening NASA's budget and the high cost of its current focus (manned spaceflight), there is another decline in large strategic science missions. That has also created difficulties for JPL.
In September, A congressionally ordered investigation found that NASA was neglecting critical long-term investments in infrastructure and workforce to fund expensive missions.
With Clipper leaving Earth, the remaining future flagship missions are either in their infancy or embroiled in financial and management problems.
That leaves JPL with few major projects to keep funds flowing to its more than 5,000 employees. Clipper engineering operations are coming to an end and NASA Headquarters has severely shut down its other flagship program, the Mars sample return, due to high costs and projected delays.
Flagship funding and concerns about cost overruns have ebbed and flowed at NASA for decades, and the future of JPL along with it.
In the 1980s, JPL was barely clinging to life as the Reagan administration considered turning the lab into a private institution and canceling its only flagship mission: Galileo.
The ordeal inspired the founding of the Planetary Society.
Fortunately, an administrator at Caltech, which runs JPL, knew the majority leader of the US Senate, effectively saving the lab and the Galileo mission that would revolutionize scientists' understanding of Europa and inspire the mission. Clippers.
“Sometimes it comes down to finding a champion,” not just a supporter, but someone with the power to move money, Dreier said. “And right now JPL doesn't have one.”
