Europa Clipper

Europa Clipper will perform repeated flybys of Jupiter’s moon and use a suite of instruments to investigate whether habitable environments could exist. Europa is one of the Solar System’s “ocean worlds”, with a subsurface liquid water ocean beneath an icy, deformed crust. Camera and spectrometer instruments will study Europa’s surface features and composition and search for erupting plumes, and a thermal instrument will search for regions that are still warm from recent activity. Magnetometers and plasma instruments will study Jupiter’s magnetic interactions to probe the ocean, and a dual-frequency radar will map the subsurface stratigraphy and search for liquid water. Mass spectrometers will analyze the composition of Europa’s exosphere, perhaps detecting organic materials.