Literally, that is. This slipped past me, as NewScientist (2 January 2016) reports:
The US government has told NASA to visit Europa in 2022. The latest budget set aside $175 million for a planned fly-by of Jupiter’s glacier moon, but it added a twist: NASA is required to land on the moon, not just fly past. Europa is a promising target in the search for extraterrestrial life, thanks to its liquid water ocean.
Via the Planetary Society, Van Kane clarifies:
“This Act includes $1,631,000,000 for Planetary Science. Of this amount, $261,000,000 is for Outer Planets, of which $175,000,000 is for the Jupiter Europa clipper mission and clarifies that this mission shall include an orbiter with a lander that will include competitively selected instruments and that funds shall be used to finalize the mission design concept with a target launch date of 2022.”
“…$175,000,000 is for an orbiter with a lander to meet the science goals for the Jupiter Europa mission as outlined in the most recent planetary science decadal survey. That the National Aeronautics and Space Administration shall use the Space Launch System as the launch vehicle for the Jupiter Europa mission, plan for a launch no later than 2022, and include in the fiscal year 2017 budget the 5-year funding profile necessary to achieve these goals.”
– Final budget law for Fiscal Year 2016 regarding NASA’s Europa mission
While there’s at least eight years until it launches, this has been a pivotal year for developing NASA’s Europa mission. Last spring, NASA selected a rich and highly capable instrument set. This summer, following a design concept review, the mission moved from concept studies to an official mission. And just last week, Congress directed NASA to expand the mission by adding a small lander as well as launch the mission by 2022 and use the Space Launch System. These latter aren’t just suggestions: they are the law.
Whew! NewScientist made it sound like the landing should occur in 2022 – virtually impossible. Kane’s post is longish and full of interesting thoughts. I’ll just quote one:
One aspect of this proposed lander concept is different than those I’ve seen before. Most lander studies have looked at small spacecraft (and this proposal would count as a small spacecraft) that would be carried by the mother craft until just before landing. For the design Berger reported on, lander and its descent stage would orbit Jupiter on their own for months to years before landing. This means that together they are a fully functional independent spacecraft with its own solar arrays for power, propulsion, navigation, and communications. Apparently the cost and mass of adding these functions to the descent stage and lander is a better bargain than adding the radiation hardening that would be required if the lander were carried past Europa 45 times.
So I’m guessing the main craft would survey Europa 45 times, and once a landing site is selected, the lander module moves into Europan orbit (only now exposed to radiation) and the descent stage goes into action. Possibly the communications will go from the descent stage to the landing unit to the primary craft, which would carry the heftier communications gear required for communications with the Deep Space Network. Although given how little power is available to the Voyagers and we can still hear them, we could still talk directly – but slowly – to the lander module (but maybe not the descent stage). But I’m just a hand waver….
