Send Names to Jupiter's Moon Europa This Holiday! | NASA Europa Clipper

Send Names to Jupiter's Moon Europa This Holiday! | NASA Europa Clipper

Know a space lover in your family? Get them an out-of-this-world gift! It's not too late! Sign up to send their name to Jupiter’s icy ocean moon Europa aboard NASA’s Europa Clipper spacecraft. 

Give the ultimate gift: https://go.nasa.gov/MessageInABottle

🚨But move fast, the deadline is Dec. 31, 2023!🚨 

Time is running out! You have less than a week left!

NASA’s Europa Clipper spacecraft—set to launch in October 2024—is designed to seek out conditions suitable for life on an ice-covered moon of Jupiter. 

Scientists are confident that Jupiter's moon Europa harbors an internal ocean with twice the amount of water in Earth’s oceans combined. It may currently have conditions suitable for supporting life. Europa Clipper will orbit Jupiter and conduct multiple close flybys of Europa to gather data on the moon’s atmosphere, surface, and interior. Its sophisticated payload will investigate everything from the depth and salinity of the ocean to the thickness of the ice crust to the characteristics of potential plumes that may be venting subsurface water into space.

Missions such as Europa Clipper contribute to the field of astrobiology, the interdisciplinary research on the variables and conditions of distant worlds that could harbor life as we know it. While Europa Clipper is not a life-detection mission, it will conduct detailed reconnaissance of Europa and investigate whether the icy moon, with its subsurface ocean, has the capability to support life. Understanding Europa’s habitability will help scientists better understand how life developed on Earth and the potential for finding life beyond our planet.

Europa Clipper’s main science goal is to determine whether there are places below Jupiter’s icy moon, Europa, that could support life. The mission’s three main science objectives are to determine the thickness of the moon’s icy shell and its surface interactions with the ocean below, to investigate its composition, and to characterize its geology. The mission’s detailed exploration of Europa will help scientists better understand the astrobiological potential for habitable worlds beyond our planet.”

More information about Europa can be found here:

europa.nasa.gov

Image Credit: NASA/Goddard

Release Date: Dec. 21, 2023

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