The launch of a satellite to Jupiter has been delayed by the European Space Agency (Esa).
The mission, which tries to determine whether the planet’s moons could support life, was at risk of lightning, according to the weather.
On Friday, Esa said it will attempt to launch the rocket once more.
One of the organization’s most challenging missions to date is the eight-year trek to Jupiter’s main moons from Earth.
There is strong evidence that the icy moons Callisto, Europa, and Ganymede contain deep oceans of liquid water.
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The Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer, or Juice for short, is the project’s name.
Juice won’t be sending back images of extraterrestrial fish because it is not looking for signs of life. However, it might be useful in determining whether there is at least a chance that simple microbial species could survive in the secret waters of the moons.
According to Prof. Carole Mundell, the director of science at Esa, this is not a wild concept.
“We find microbial life in some form in every extreme environment on Earth, whether that’s high acidity, high radioactivity, low temperature, or high temperature,” she told BBC News.
“The (volcanic) vents at the bottom of Earth’s seas even resemble other worlds when viewed from above. If we have identical conditions, there is no reason why that microbial life could not be able to exist elsewhere. And Juice will be used to analyze those circumstances.
The €1.6 billion (£1.4 billion; $ 1.7 billion) mission was scheduled to lift off on Thursday at 09:15 local time (13:15 BST) from Kourou, French Guiana, using an Ariane-5 rocket.
Certainly not in a timely manner, the Ariane lacks the energy to send Juice directly to Jupiter.
It will instead direct the spacecraft to orbit the inner Solar System. The expedition will then be gravitationally thrown out to its final location after a series of fly-bys of Venus and Earth.
It is anticipated to arrive at the Jovian system in July 2031.
Before entering an orbit around Ganymede, Juice will make 35 close laps of the moons, occasionally coming within 400 kilometers (250 miles) of their surfaces.
There are ten instruments in all on board the spacecraft. There are numerous cameras, particle detectors, a radar to map features below the surface, and even a lidar to create 3D maps of the topography.
But the magnetometer supplied by the UK may offer some of the most important information. The experiment developed by Imperial College London will provide information on the characteristics of the moons’ subsurface oceans. Particularly at Ganymede, the details should be fairly specific.
“We’ll know the depth of the ocean, its salt content, how deep the crust is above the ocean, and whether the ocean is in contact with the rocky mantle,” said Prof. Michele Dougherty, the magnetometer’s primary investigator at Imperial.
“So, we’ll gain knowledge of the lunar interior structure, and we’ll be able to determine whether there is organic material on the moon’s surface from observations made by other instruments looking at its surface,” said the researcher.
Earth has taught us that for life to exist, four factors are necessary: liquid water, some type of nutrition, an energy source, and time, which is a prolonged period of stability that allows biology to establish itself.
Mars has long been thought to be the planet most likely to harbor extraterrestrial life, if not now then certainly in the distant past.
However, the ice-covered moons of Jupiter and Saturn are really starting to get the attention of astrobiologists, scientists who investigate the possibility of life elsewhere in the Universe.
Even though these worlds are distant from the Sun and in the chilly outer limits of the Solar System, they could just be able to meet the four inputs. Instead of heat and light from a star, the moons are constantly being pushed and squeezed by the huge planets’ gravitational pull.
This flexure gives water the ability to remain liquid and may also power the types of volcanic vent systems Prof. Mundell cites on ocean floors, which some scientists believe may have been the first places where life on Earth emerged.
Prof. Lewis Dartnell, an astrobiologist at the University of Westminster, thinks that if he were a betting man, he “would probably put his money on Europa having life that is alive, that exists today.” There is a considerably greater possibility of that happening than of currently existing (living) life on Mars.
Next year, the US will launch its counterpart mission, called Clipper. It will concentrate on Europa and perform 50 fly-bys, some as close as 25 kilometers.
Usually, a later spacecraft enters orbit after a near approach of a planet, and a subsequent mission makes an attempt to land.
This is how Mars exploration has advanced, and we’re about to take another step by attempting to bring samples back to Earth for laboratory analysis.
It is plausible to envision missions later this century that could land on these fascinating outer Solar System entities in order to drill through their icy crusts and study the waters below. While investigations at Jupiter’s and Saturn’s moons are not as far along in the sequence, it is still doable.
According to Astronomer Royal Prof. Sir Martin Rees, “if we find evidence for life on the moons of Saturn or Jupiter, it would almost certainly be of independent origin.”
“That would then carry a momentous message that life — if it had started twice, independently, in our Solar System — can’t be a rare fluke, and almost certainly exists in a billion places in our galaxy, and it completely transforms the way we look at the sky.”
