Europa mission lost in space budget

By Leonard David

Senior space writer

updated 1:17 p.m. ET Feb. 7, 2006

NASA’s newly issued budget has lowered a flagship mission of exploration to half-mast. Although it's long been backed by scientists and study groups, a mission to Jupiter’s moon Europa is missing in action within the pages of NASA’s 2007 budget, unveiled on Monday.

The smallest of Jupiter’s Galilean satellites — about the size of Earth’s moon — Europa has a facade of white and brown-tinged water ice. Hidden under that frozen crust, Europa may well harbor a global ocean of liquid water. And coupled to the prospect for a subsurface ocean comes the tempting thought of life.

“NASA’s robotic exploration program is being flatlined, setting aside a mission to Europa to search for its ice-covered ocean and perhaps for life itself,” the Planetary Society's executive director, Louis Friedman, said in a statement released Monday.

Both the National Academy of Sciences and internal NASA advisory committees have endorsed Europa exploration as the highest-priority solar system objective after Mars.

Last year, the U.S. Congress directed NASA to plan a fiscal year 2007 start on a Europa mission. “If the proposed budget is adopted, that directive will be ignored, and no Europa mission will be planned,” the Planetary Society statement noted.

So many false starts
“I am disappointed that after so many false starts over the last decade, it looks like a mission to Europa is slipping once again,” said Ronald Greeley, a leading planetary scientist in the Department of Geological Sciences at Arizona State University in Tempe. He also chairs a Europa focus group of scientists keen on furthering the study of the Jovian moon.

Greeley told Space.com that the hope had been that a serious study of a Europa mission would be completed this year in anticipation of a new start at NASA very soon.

“The planetary community remains essentially unanimous in setting Europa as the highest-priority large mission to the outer solar system,” he said.

Europa as well as Titan “are of extremely high scientific interest,” said Jonathan Lunine, professor of planetary sciences and physics at the University of Arizona in Tucson.

Like the Galileo spacecraft that bolstered the hunger to plumb the mysteries of Europa, the Cassini-Huygens mission has revealed Titan to be a captivating world demanding more scrutiny.

Missions to both worlds should be flown “as the cornerstones of a vigorous effort to explore astrobiologically interesting bodies in the outer solar system,” Lunine said. “The technology is there. All that is needed is the will to exercise it,” he added.

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