Michele Dougherty interview: How JUICE will look for habitability on Jupiter’s moons

DECADES-LONG house missions are deliberate right down to the second. The precise routes the craft journey by the photo voltaic system are meticulously mapped out, primarily based on years of design and testing. If you wish to deviate from these, you had higher have a compelling motive.

However that’s exactly what occurred in 2005, throughout NASA’s Cassini mission to Saturn. Upon seeing something unusual, Michele Dougherty, a physicist at Imperial School London, requested for a better take a look at one among Saturn’s moons, Enceladus. What the probe noticed was unbelievable: massive plumes of water vapour erupting from cracks on the moon’s south pole.

At this time, with Cassini lengthy gone, Dougherty is trying ahead to creating additional uncommon discoveries, because the principal investigator on the Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (JUICE) mission operated by the European Area Company (ESA). This challenge, which launched in April, has a transparent objective: to higher perceive whether or not Jupiter’s moons have the best elements to harbour life.

Jupiter has between 80 and 95 moons, however JUICE will give attention to three of its 4 largest. It is going to fly by Europa, Ganymede – the most important moon within the photo voltaic system – and Callisto, earlier than going into orbit round Ganymede.

Dougherty tells New Scientist why we should be open to the sudden secrets and techniques that would lurk beneath the icy exteriors of those worlds and the way she plans to disclose them.

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