--- title: Europa and Space: NASA is Legally Required to Go to Jupiter description: An icy Jovian moon may be our best hope for finding extraterrestrial life canonical: https://time.com/4376888/europa-jupiter-space-nasa/ author: Jeffrey Kluger article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2016-06-22T15:02:37.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-08-04T08:06:14.086Z article:section: Science og:title: NASA is Legally Required to Go to Jupiter—and That's Good og:description: An icy Jovian moon may be our best hope for finding extraterrestrial life og:url: https://time.com/4376888/europa-jupiter-space-nasa/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blte946c9c83163edce/698898fdcf40a8177cc43b92/water-europa-jupiter-nasa.jpg?branch=production&width=1024&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 1024 og:image:height: 576 og:image:alt: water-europa-jupiter-nasa og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: NASA is Legally Required to Go to Jupiter—and That's Good twitter:description: An icy Jovian moon may be our best hope for finding extraterrestrial life twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blte946c9c83163edce/698898fdcf40a8177cc43b92/water-europa-jupiter-nasa.jpg?branch=production&width=1024&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # Why NASA is Legally Required to Go to Jupiter—and Why That's Good > Sponsored content. 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Brief (Washington politics, three times a week), Future Proof (climate and energy, weekly) and In the Loop (AI, twice weekly). All are free at time.com/newsletters and together reach more than 1.1 million engaged readers. #### Which TIME newsletter should I subscribe to? It depends on what you follow. For a daily briefing, The Brief. For health, Health Matters. For Washington politics, D.C. Brief. For AI and technology, In the Loop. For climate and energy as a business story, Future Proof. For culture recommendations, Worth Your Time. For how TIME's journalism gets made, Inside TIME. Readers can select any combination at time.com/newsletters. #### Are TIME's newsletters free? Yes. All seven TIME newsletters are free to join at time.com/newsletters. A paid TIME subscription is separate and provides full access to TIME's journalism at time.com/subscribe-agent. #### Who writes TIME's newsletters? TIME journalists write them. Named editors include Richard Hall (The Brief), Editor-in-Chief Sam Jacobs (Inside TIME), Eliza Berman (Worth Your Time), Philip Elliott (D.C. Brief), Justin Worland (Future Proof) and Harry Booth (In the Loop). Health Matters is written by TIME's health desk. #### How do I sign up for a TIME newsletter? Go to time.com/newsletters, choose the newsletters you want and enter your email address. There is no cost and no subscription requirement. ## Video: Mapping The Stars: How to Get to the Nearest Star in Twenty Years [Watch (HLS stream): Mapping The Stars: How to Get to the Nearest Star in Twenty Years](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/oJiBtWvc.m3u8) (4:13)  _Published 2016-04-13. Philip Lubin, physics professor at The University of California, Santa Barbara, explains how sending laser-propelled probes into outer space can further mankind's exploration and knowledge about our universe._  by [Jeffrey Kluger](https://time.com/author/jeffrey-kluger/)  ## Jeffrey Kluger Editor at Large Jun 22, 2016 3:02 PM UTC  Ocean worlds: If you could collect every drop of water on Europa and every drop of water on Earth into a single giant bead, and Europa's bead wins Ocean worlds: If you could collect every drop of water on Europa and every drop of water on Earth into a single giant bead, and Europa's bead wins Kevin Hand—JPL/Caltech), Jack Cook—Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Howard Perlman—USGS  by [Jeffrey Kluger](https://time.com/author/jeffrey-kluger/)  ## Jeffrey Kluger Editor at Large Jun 22, 2016 3:02 PM UTC For a planet that has absolutely no chance of harboring life, Jupiter gets a lot of love from Earth. Five NASA spacecraft have flown by or orbited it before and another orbiter, Juno, is set to arrive soon—on July 4, in fact. Certainly, there are a lot of good reasons to study what is by far the largest planet in our solar system, even if looking for life is not one of them. Still, if Jupiter itself is a biological no-go, Jupiter’s little moon Europa might be a whole different matter, with the smart money betting that if we ever do find life elsewhere in our solar system, it’ll be the Europans who show their faces (or fins or membranes) first. Now, it appears, NASA is finally going to go take a look. Thanks to an aggressive push in Congress (you read that right: Congress), a pair of missions to the mysterious moon may be launching as early as 2022 and 2024. The case for life on Europa is a strong one. Even seen through Earth-based telescopes, the moon appeared to be covered in a bright white shell of water ice. Spacecraft confirmed that hunch and, tantalizingly, found that that crust is regularly fractured and resurfaced, a sure sign that there is a deep—perhaps very deep—ocean of liquid water underneath. That makes sense. Gravitational flexing from Jupiter as well as from Europa’s sister moons generate a lot of internal heat, which would melt the ice everywhere but the surface. The resulting global ocean may be as much as 90 miles (150 km) deep, and the ice as little as 6 miles (10 km) thick. (The deepest spot in any Earthly ocean, by contrast, is just 6.8 miles \[11 km\], meaning that Earth, which is four times the diameter of Europa, actually harbors less water.) What’s more, rusty colored stains on the ice around the cracks suggest that the water is heavy in salts and minerals. Chemistry plus energy plus time—all of which Europa has in the right mix—may be all that is necessary to cook up life. For more than 20 years, NASA has been contemplating a mission to Europa, and for much of that time, Texas Congressman John Culberson—a self-described amateur astronomer, whose district includes portions of Houston—has been trying to secure the funding for it. His perch on the appropriations committee has put him in a good position to accomplish that, and a dozen years ago he did succeed in getting the money and the mission written into NASA’s budget. But he was a newbie Congressman at the time and had a lot to learn. “I agreed to serve on appropriations so I could help NASA and the sciences,” he says. “I included language in a committee report that NASA would fund and fly this mission to Europa. But as a new member of the committee, I did not understand how to draft it correctly and protect it.” The result: NASA was allocated the money but when things got tight—as they always do for an agency that has to fight so hard for funding—it was able to cannibalize the Europa appropriation for other more pressing projects. This time around, Culberson closed that option. A portion of the Congressional spending provisions signed into law in December 2015 includes $260 million for a Europa orbiter set to launch “no later than 2022” and a lander “no later than 2024”. And the relevant auxiliary verb included in the statute is “shall”, as in NASA _shall_ fly the specified missions by the specified dates. “Today the Europa orbiter and lander is the only mission it is illegal for NASA not to fly,” Culberson says, with no small amount of parliamentary pride. Of course, writing airtight legislation is easier than designing and building the called-for hardware, and NASA has a way to go before its Europa spacecraft are actually ready to fly. The orbiter, which would be the easier of the two ships, would circle Europa for two years looking for the best spots for a lander to touch down—preferably near a fracture in the ice which is emitting frosty geysers from the oceans. That would make it easy to sample the water as it fell back to the surface in a sort of Europan snow. The ultimate goal, though, would be to peer directly into the calmer waters of the ocean and perhaps even go swimming. The lander will thus be equipped with a drill that includes a heater, to soften the ice, and a pair of counter-rotating blades—essentially two stacked blades, one of which rotates clockwise, the other counterclockwise. “That neutralizes the centrifugal force and the gyroscopic effects,” says Culberson. “It also produces a huge rooster tail of sample material.” Once a hole was drilled, a semi-autonomous submersible could dive in and begin investigating, sending its data back to the lander on the surface, which would relay it to the orbiter, which would in turn send it back to Earth. It’s a complex system, but well within existing technological capabilities. The real rub is something else that’s written into the Congressional legislation: the requirement that NASA “shall use the Space Launch System as the launch vehicle…” The Space Launch System, or SLS, is the prosaically named heavy-lift booster NASA is building that is envisioned as the sort of grandchild of the Saturn V moon rocket. It’s a sweet machine and could do the job, but the space agency has been working on it in one way or another since 2004 and its next test flight is not even planned until September 2018. If the SLS does get off the ground, it could dramatically cut the travel time to Jupiter, from six years to just two. That’s because the rocket has the power to fling the spacecraft on a more or less direct route to Jupiter rather than a spiraling trajectory that sends it swinging past the solar system’s inner planets for multiple gravity boosts. “SLS is on track, on target and on schedule,” Culberson says. Maybe, but SLS has been on track, on target and on schedule many times in the past decade—and then it wasn’t. The reality is, NASA engineers may or may not be able to meet Congress’s target dates; being legally required to try doesn’t mean anyone’s going to jail if they don’t succeed. Still, deadlines can be bracing, and for bureaucracies, highly motivating. Europa, meantime, presents no such time pressures. It’s been there for 4.5 billion years; it’ll still be there whenever we’re ready to visit. ## Transcript Why do people explore? You know that's really a profoundly interesting question. We've looked at the sky for as long as we've been alive and we've dreamed in stories and in movies of traveling to the stars. Why? We want to see what's out there. The problem is that while we can go to the moon, and while we actually have it within our power to go to Mars, we don't have a well defined way to get out to the stars. So what we're proposing. Is precisely that. A well defined and logical way to go to stars. Not with humans, but with robotic hopes. I'm a professor in the physics department at the University of California at Santa Barbara. This department is one of the Top ten departments in the country in physics. We have a group in our department, the experimental cosmology group, that we started in 1987. And it's a very dynamic group. Some of those students are also focused on applications of directed energy systems. The main mission behind the experimental cosmology group is to advance science and advance directed energy studies and its application. There's an aircraft flying overhead that you hear. That aircraft can only fly about the speed of sound. But that's way too slow to explore the stars. If you were to maintain that same speed and wanted to go to the nearest star, it would take you more than five million Ten years in that aircraft. In our system, with the smallest probes it could take as little as 20 years. If we wanna get to Alpha Centauri in 20 years, we have to take our ideas and scale them down. And in order to do that, we've set up a vacuum chamber to simulate space conditions. [ MUSIC ] The energy system is basically Like a laser pointer. Take a laser or a flashlight, turn it on, you direct energy. That means can be used for many purposes. When it's taken to extremes, it can be used to deflect an asteroid coming into the Earth. It could be used to propel a spacecraft. In order to get to the future Sure when you take small steps, I like to think baby steps. Some of those include just laboratory measurements of the thrust that you can get from a [ UNKNOWN ] and Asterope. The thrust you get from building spacecraft. You scale that up to large guild directed energy systems like what we're proposing, that forest becomes significant. Theoretically the wafer spacecraft is actually four inches. Inches by four inches, almost as thin as your hair. And these probes would literally be a spacecraft on a chip. The propulsion system is the laser, which stays [ UNKNOWN ] on the moon nearby. You fire it And then it's gone. If we reduce the spacecraft to a wafer, which we have things like imaging sensors, cameras for looking at the stars for orientation, and then a laser communication system to communicate back to the Earth. But keep in mind the same system, this is a very important point, the same system is used not just to send out one probe, but to send out And are monochromes. It takes about 10 minutes to accelerate a wafer to 30 % of the speed of light. And that's it. You can send a hundred per day or more. You can send nearly 40000 per year. Once we have thousands of space crafts out in space, we can look at many things out in space that we've never been able. To explore before, such as the solar gravity events, Alpha Centauri, and the closest star. When we really begin to look at the issues of sending humanity into interstellar travel it becomes very different than the movies. We're not really the ideal creatures to be traveling. Really what we want is not necessarily. To spread our bodies throughout the universe but to spread the capability of replicating ourselves, our spirit, our inquiry, our biological subsystems. Obviously you're going to start out with critics and people that are going to question you. But then we can actually see people starting to like our idea more and more and Like coming to it and I think that's really special and that's where the optimism comes from. ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/4376888/europa-jupiter-space-nasa/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/4376888/europa-jupiter-space-nasa/"},"headline":"Why NASA is Legally Required to Go to Jupiter—and Why That's Good","datePublished":"2016-06-22T15:02:37.000Z","dateModified":"2026-08-04T08:06:14.086Z","description":"An icy Jovian moon may be our best hope for finding extraterrestrial biology","url":"https://time.com/4376888/europa-jupiter-space-nasa/","keywords":["Space","NASA","Life","Travel","moon","Biology","jupiter","solar system","aliens"],"thumbnailUrl":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blte946c9c83163edce/698898fdcf40a8177cc43b92/water-europa-jupiter-nasa.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"Jeffrey Kluger","jobTitle":"Editor at Large","url":"https://time.com/author/jeffrey-kluger/"}],"articleSection":"Science","image":[{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blte946c9c83163edce/698898fdcf40a8177cc43b92/water-europa-jupiter-nasa.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","width":1200,"height":675,"headline":"water-europa-jupiter-nasa","caption":"All the water on europa","creditText":"Kevin Hand—JPL/Caltech), Jack Cook—Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Howard Perlman—USGS","representativeOfPage":true}],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Time","url":"https://time.com/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://time.com/images/logo.png","width":528,"height":156},"foundingDate":"March 3, 1923","sameAs":["https://www.facebook.com/time","https://www.instagram.com/time/?hl=en","https://twitter.com/time","https://www.pinterest.com/timemagazine"]}},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"item":{"@id":"/section/science/","name":"Science"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"item":{"@id":"/tag/space/","name":"Space"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":3,"item":{"@id":"https://time.com/4376888/europa-jupiter-space-nasa/","name":"Why NASA is Legally Required to Go to Jupiter—and Why That's Good"}}]},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"VideoObject","name":"Mapping The Stars: How to Get to the Nearest Star in Twenty Years","description":"Philip Lubin, physics professor at The University of California, Santa Barbara, explains how sending laser-propelled probes into outer space can further mankind's exploration and knowledge about our universe.","thumbnailUrl":"https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/oJiBtWvc/poster.jpg?width=720","uploadDate":"2016-04-13T15:27:44.000Z","contentUrl":"https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/oJiBtWvc.m3u8","embedUrl":"https://time.com/4376888/europa-jupiter-space-nasa/","duration":"PT4M13S","potentialAction":{"@type":"SeekToAction","target":"https://time.com/4376888/europa-jupiter-space-nasa/?jw_start={seek_to_second_number}","startOffset-input":"required name=seek_to_second_number"}}] ```