Mission to Europa moon

With tantalizing hints of a global salty ocean lying beneath a layer of fractured ice, Jupiter‘s moon Europa has been catapulted to the top of the list of suitable homes for ETs in the solar system.

Now NASA has begun mapping out what a future mission to this intriguing worldlet may look like.

A new paper by leading planetary researchers released this week in the journal Astrobiology details plans for a possible lander being launched sometime in the next decade. The vehicle would boast a drill and microscope camera, similar to instruments aboard Mars Curiosity and Cassini (see Curiosity’s top five discoveries).

“Europa is the most likely place in our solar system beyond Earth to have life today, and a landed mission would be the best way to search for signs of life,” said Robert Pappalardo, the lead author of the study, and researcher at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in a press statement.

Thanks to flyby robotic missions of Voyager in the 1980s and a Gallileo probe in the 1990s, Europa is thought to have a hidden ocean formed by tidal forces from nearby Jupiter’s massive gravitational effect that heats the moon’s interior. What has particularly excited researchers as potential spots to search for possible microbial life are dark, red-tainted fractures scattered across the moon’s icy shell that suggest that dirty, briny water has welled up and frozen on the moon’s surface.

How can we go to Europa moon?

"Europa Report" is one of the most realistic movies about a space odyssey since "2001," but there's one thing you'll see in the film that you won't see anytime soon in a real-life mission to Europa, Jupiter's most mysterious moon: a human crew.

"We're not at the stage of sending astronauts to Europa. That's well off," said Robert Pappalardo, a research scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory who has been working for years on plans to explore Europa. "There are things that would be wonderful to do with a person, but of course, it's much less expensive to start out with robotic spacecraft. If we find there is evidence for life someday with a rover, then we can start talking about things that are more science-fictiony."

Let's face it: Few filmgoers would flock to a movie about robotic orbiters and landers heading out on a years-long trip to an icy moon of Jupiter, even if that moon might harbor life in a watery ocean deep beneath the ice. The drama comes from how people deal with the otherworldly challenges of the trip. "Europa Report" — which opens in theaters on Friday, after a weeks-long run on iTunes and cable video on demand — has that drama all the way through, wrapped up in enough plausibility to make you wonder why we're not already on our way to Europa.