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The Giant Space Whales of Europa
We’re pretty sure that there are alien oceans. By “alien oceans”, I just mean oceans on places other than Earth. And if you play with the definition a little bit, we have photographs of one — the methane ocean of Saturn’s moon Titan.
And that’s super cool, no doubt, but when somebody is talking about oceans, we’re really talking about oceans of water. And we’ve got pretty strong evidence that a number of moons have oceans of liquid water beneath a shell of ice. Indeed, the evidence seems to be piling up that most icy moons may have some subsurface water, melted by internal heat caused by radioactive decay or tidal forces with the parent body, depending on which moon you’re talking about. Let’s narrow our focus to one moon in particular.
For a number of reasons, the first moon we’re likely to space whales on is Jupiter’s moon, Europa. Currently scheduled to launch in October 2024, NASA’s Europa Clipper mission is to rendezvous with Jupiter in 2030 and perform extensive surveying, mapping, and study of Europa in a long series of close flybys. What’s most interesting about the Europa Clipper is what the aim of all that surveying and mapping is — to narrow down a landing site for a future vessel.
The Challenge for the Europa Lander
At first blush, the problems of exploring the Europan ocean don’t seem that difficult — sure, you’ve got to get through that icy shell, but you just melt it with a nuclear reactor, right? You don’t even have to risk contamination; you just have a surface reactor with a long cable that powers a probe. Penetrate the ice, and then look around. That ice is believed to be up to 2.4 miles thick.
A hole that deep is not entirely beyond the scope of human endeavor; the Soviets drilled the Kola Superdeep in the seventies and eighties, and that is indeed about seven miles deep. But firstly, that took decades; a spacecraft is likely to have a few years, or perhaps even less in the punishing…
