<
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/persons-of-interest/the-woman-who-helped-send-a-spacecraft-to-europa-jupiters-icy-moon>
"Just after noon on Monday, a SpaceX rocket stood on the same launchpad that
once sent men to the moon. Hurricane Milton had recently ripped across Florida,
whipping up winds of a hundred miles per hour in Cape Canaveral, but now the
skies were a featureless blue. From a restricted viewing area not far away,
Louise Prockter, a graceful scientist with sandy hair, glanced at a countdown
clock and then back at the rocket, which carried her lifework. “Surreal,” she
said softly. “This just doesn’t feel real.” There were three minutes until
ignition.
On top of the rocket was
Europa Clipper, a spacecraft about the size of a
basketball court which is destined for one of Jupiter’s most enigmatic moons.
Europa, which is roughly the size of our moon, is a striking ball of blue ice
crisscrossed with crimson cracks. Galileo discovered it orbiting Jupiter in
1610, demonstrating in the process that the Earth might not be the center of
the universe. Beneath Europa’s frozen shell is a liquid salt-water ocean:
perhaps the most likely place in the solar system to harbor alien life.
Crucially, its interior is also warmed by a gravitational tug-of-war between
its parent planet and fellow-moons. As a result, Europa’s rocky mantle likely
spews heat and nutrients into its ocean—creating conditions that, over billions
of years, could have turned chemistry into biology.
But the cosmic forces that make Europa special also make it treacherous for
spacecraft. Jupiter’s powerful magnetic field traps particles and accelerates
them to large fractions of light speed, creating powerful belts of radiation.
The most prominent source of those particles is Io, the neighboring volcanic
moon.
Europa Clipper will have to endure the level of radioactivity that
would be produced by a thermonuclear war.
When Prockter talks about her job—chief scientist of space exploration at the
Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (A.P.L.)—she often half
smiles, as though in recognition of the absurd grandeur of space exploration.
As the launch approached, she had a kind of energetic calm. She hoped that the
rocket wouldn’t blow up; she thought about her family, who were proudly
watching a live stream in the U.K. She thought about how far the
Europa
Clipper team had come, and how the spacecraft was only beginning its journey.
The countdown continued.
The total cost of
Europa Clipper is about five billion dollars, comparable to
previous NASA flagships such as the Cassini mission. But the real cost of this
voyage has been time. Prockter was thirty years old when she first learned
about Europa. She was involved in a seventeen-year struggle to win scientific
support for a mission there. Then came a decade-long engineering effort to
build a suitable spacecraft. Even now,
Clipper will need almost six years to
reach Jupiter and another four to study Europa—at which point Prockter will be
around seventy. Several of her senior colleagues didn’t live long enough to see
this day."
Via
Fix the News:
https://fixthenews.com/274-beautiful-confusion-billion-years/
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
