In 2015, bill nye Was on Marine One with President Obama.
The television personality and science advocate was officially there for the Earth Day event, but she also took the opportunity to talk to the President about space exploration, and in particular, a mission still underway at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge. It is in its infancy and is in dire need. Nidhi.
After a decade of advocacy by scientists, the mission is expected to launch as early as Friday, and will investigate Jupiter’s icy moon Europa, which is suspected to have vast oceans capable of supporting life.
“There are two questions: Where do we come from? And, are we alone in the universe?” Nee said. “If you meet someone who says he never asks these questions, he is not being honest with you.”
Engineered 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.
Nee said, “If we find life on other worlds, it will change life on this world.” “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.”
Clipper is one of NASA’s last multibillion-dollar “flagship” projects in development this decade, following the James Webb Space Telescope and the Perseverance Mars rover. Faces budget constraints and project management issues,
“I often talk about these missions as modern cathedrals. They are generational discoveries,” NASA JPL Director Laurie Leshin said at a news conference for the Clipper launch. “I’m really proud that, as humanity, we have chosen to pursue these hard and long-term goals – things like exploring the unknown at Jupiter.”
NASA has until November 6 to begin investigating and is currently waiting for Hurricane Milton to pass off Florida’s Space Coast.
Once the spacecraft leaves its Cape Canaveral launchpad, it begins a five-and-a-half-year journey — first sling-shotting around Mars in early 2025, and then around Earth in late 2026. It speeds towards the largest of the solar system before flying away rapidly. planets and an incredibly dynamic moon.
Europa orbits Jupiter in just three and a half days and travels 10 times faster than our moon. The intense gravitational forces from the gas giant continually crush and strain the moon’s core, causing it to heat up.
Scientists believe hydrothermal water vents funnel the core’s heat upward, melting the vast ocean that lies about 15 miles beneath the moon’s icy crust. Deeper than humans have ever dug On earth.
Earth observations and orbiting probes show that some of this water works its way through cracks in the ice and erupts into geysers more than a hundred miles high.
With sources of energy in the form of liquid water and heat, Europa has fascinated scientists for decades. If it also contains organic compounds, such as amino acids, which make up the proteins that make up cells, Europa could be home to alien life-forms.
Clipper will search for light signatures of these compounds on Europa – and look for any material that may have been erupted into space by meteorites or geysers.
“If there’s anything alive — imagine a European microbe, let alone European fish people — these things will be shot into space,” Nie said. “If you sample water in any pond anywhere on Earth, wherever there’s moisture, you’ll find all these viruses and bacteria and microbes, and so it’s reasonable that we find at least organic compounds.”
(NASA is almost sure it won’t find fish people, but that hasn’t stopped scientists from dreaming.)
Although previous missions to Jupiter have given scientists a rough sketch of the moon, Clipper will help paint a detailed picture.
Once Clipper reaches Jupiter, it will orbit the gas giant 80 times over the course of four years, making 49 Europa flybys, as much as 16 miles above the surface, to collect data from pole to pole.
Within its first few flybys, scientists should be able to confirm the existence of the ocean — all by reading the magnetic field generated by the moon and measuring its gravity to determine how much it pulls the spacecraft.
They will also get some of the highest-resolution images of the Moon ever taken and the first readings of molecules near the surface.
Throughout the mission, Clipper will study the complex dynamics of how the ocean interacts with the icy crust and warm mantle below. It will slowly be revealed as the probe uses penetrating radio waves to look beneath the icy layer – much like an X-ray machine.
“Clipper is going to be the first deep mission that will allow us to characterize the most common type of habitable world in our universe,” said Gina DeBrashio, acting director of the Planetary Science Division at NASA Headquarters. A news conference.
On September 3, 2034, Europa Clipper will deliberately collide with Jupiter’s rocky moon Ganymede, ensuring the spacecraft will not accidentally strike one of the planet’s more scientifically interesting moons.
That is, unless NASA decides to move the mission forward, which has happened often in the past.
Clipper is not the first mission to explore an icy moon. The Galileo probe flew past it in the 1990s, confirming scientists’ early hopes that the moon was more than a cool ball of rock orbiting Earth.
The enthusiasm led scientists to formally request NASA for a dedicated Europa mission 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 at the time, the agency was in the dark.
By 2013, NASA had finished dealing with cost overruns on the Curiosity Mars rover and the agency was focused on getting the James Webb Space Telescope into space. While Congress cut its planetary science budget nearly in half from a decade earlier.
So, the science guy got involved.
“We realized this (mission) would be possible at the Planetary Society 10 years ago,” Nee said, “and so we just got at it: ‘Look, everybody, write letters, write emails, talk to your congressmen. Come the day of our action.
The Planetary Society, a Pasadena-based nonprofit led by its chief executive and longtime member, decided to throw its support behind the Europa mission. Its leadership 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 clearly told scientists and Congress that it would not fund the Europa mission. in its budget request,
“That never happens,” said Casey Dreier, head of space policy at the Planetary Society. “They never requested a budget, ‘We’re not going to do anything. There’s no money. Basically, please stop asking.’
But by the next year, NASA asked Congress for $15 million to launch a billion-dollar investigation. A Texas congressman, who was a champion for space funding – and also had power in the budget process – decided to give $100 million to the agency.
NASA chose JPL to design and build the spacecraft.
“It’s no surprise to see JPL win the contract for a planetary mission,” said Matthew Schindel, curator of planetary science and exploration at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum.
“His track record really is incredible,” he said. “Therefore, they are one of NASA’s most trusted centers when it comes to developing large robotic missions.”
Today, NASA’s budget has shrunk even further due to inflation and the high cost of its current focus – human spaceflight – has led to a further decline in large, strategic science missions. This has also created problems for JPL.
on September, An investigation ordered by Congress found NASA was neglecting critical long-term investments in infrastructure and workforce in favor of funding expensive missions.
With Clipper leaving Earth, the remaining major future missions are either in their infancy or embroiled in financial and management crises.
This leaves JPL with few major projects to keep money flowing to its more than 5,000 employees. Clipper engineering operations are being shut down and NASA Headquarters has severely curtailed its other major program, Mars Sample Return, due to high estimated costs and delays.
Concerns about flagship funding and cost overruns have been looming at NASA for decades – and with it the future of JPL.
In the 1980s, JPL was barely clinging to life as the Reagan administration considered closing the lab as a private institution and canceling its only major mission: Galileo.
tough exam inspired the establishment Of the Planetary Society.
Fortunately, a trustee of Caltech, which manages JPL, knew the U.S. Senate majority leader, effectively saving the laboratory and the Galileo mission, which would revolutionize scientists’ understanding of Europa and The clipper will propel the mission.
“Sometimes it really comes down to finding a champion” — not just a supporter, but someone with the power to actually move money, Dreier said. “And right now JPL doesn’t have one.”
