Scientists have been trying to answer the question "is there life outside our planet?" And it turns out the best place to look for life is on an ocean world in our own solar system.
Europa may be that world. It’s actually one of Jupiter’s moons and it's covered with a hard, icy shell. But there could be a saltwater ocean underneath that shell, with twice the water in all of Earth’s oceans, that could support life.
That’s where NASA’s Europa Clipper Mission comes in. The Clipper blasted off in 2024 and is traveling 1.8 billion miles to reach Jupiter in 2030, and it will focus on the moon, its shell and the ocean underneath it.
Dr. Ashley Davies is a Principal Scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology and a Co-Investigator on the Mapping Imaging Spectrometer for Europa’s (MISE) instrument on the mission and he’s coming to JUMP in Boise on Saturday, Sept. 26 for Interplanetary Life - March of the Robots!
When we heard about the March of the Robots, we had to know more, so Idaho Matters asked Spacepoint if they could help us get in touch with some of the people involved with the missions and they connected us with Dr. Davies and Cyprus Van Inwegen, the Director of Communications at Spacepoint.
Find out more about other robot missions at our Space Robots page!
