2024 Marks an Important Year in NASA ’ s Search for Extraterrestrial Life

Not a lot of spacecraft have gone aloft with poetry etched on their sides. Actually, no spacecraft has ever gone aloft with poetry etched on its side—but no spacecraft has ever been quite like NASA’s Europa Clipper. The ship, which is in its final stages of assembly, will launch in October, making a long, six-year journey out to Jupiter. Once there, it will execute a series of close-up flybys of the planet’s mysterious moon Europa—a world that has an icy shell and a globe-girdling ocean, and is the one place in the solar system outside of Earth that astronomers and exobiologists consider the likeliest to harbor life. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] That kind of promise is the stuff of cosmic lyricism, and last year, U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón penned some verse in honor of both the moon and the mission, writing in part: [E]ach rivulet, each pulse, each vein. O second moon, we, too, are made of water, Of vast and beckoning seas. We, too, are made of wonders, of great. And ordinary loves, of small invisible worlds, Of a need to call out through the dark. Come 2030, when the spacecraft arrives in the Jovian system, call out through the dark it will—perhaps answering the long-compelling question of whether we are all alone in a cold and vast universe or if somewhere out there we have company. “We’re trying to understand the potential habitability of Europa,” says NASA project scientist Robert Papp...
Source: TIME: Science - Category: Science Authors: Tags: Uncategorized healthscienceclimate Source Type: news