NASA approved a new robotic mission to Jupiter’s icy moon Europa after a major internal review.
NASA will begin preliminary design and testing later this month, and the space agency intends to launch a probe sometime in the early 2020s.
The Europa Clipper probe will investigate the icy moon’s potential for human colonization and alien life. Europa probably has water oceans below layers of ice that are likely kept warm by complex gravitational interactions. The moon’s core may also keep the oceans warm.
NASA officials previously found clay-like minerals associated with organic matter on Earth on the moon’s icy crust.
President Donald Trump wants NASA to focus on eliminating bureaucratic waste and cutting back environmental science research in favor of more ambitious goals, like sending humans to Mars and robots to Europa — two of the best places to find alien life near Earth.
Former President Barack Obama requested NASA’s mission to Europa receive only $49.6 million in 2017, far less than the $175 million the mission got from Congress in 2016.
Obama’s budget earmarked money not spent on the probe to global warming research. A rival proposal from the House allocates $260 million to fully fund the mission for the next year.
The Obama administration wanted more than $2 billion for NASA’s Earth Science Mission Directorate to improve climate modeling, weather prediction and natural hazard mitigation. The directorate’s goal is to help NASA “meet the challenges of climate and environmental change.” Obama repeatedly attempted to cut other NASA directorates’ budgets to fund global warming science.
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