Russia to Search For Life on Europa

porkpickle writes "Russia plans to participate in a European mission to investigate Jupiter's moon Europa and search for simple life forms. The head of the Space Research Institute, Lev Zelyony, said a project to explore the giant gaseous planet Jupiter would shortly be included in the program of the European Space Agency (ESA) for the years 2015 to 2025."

Comments

Re:Finally someone is sane

[CheshireCatCO]

Actually, it's looking for fruit in a fruit tree where the fruits are *high*. Europa, while the best extra-terrestrial candidate for bearing life at present, requires some serious radiation shielding on any spacecraft going there, a fairly expensive landing, and a *lot* of work to bore through 1-10 km of literally-rock-hard ice. The probability of finding a viable ecosystem is balanced against the great difficulty to get to it.

As I recall, a recent NASA study said that they can't do it for under $1 billion (US); actually, I think that they found that they couldn't even do a decent orbiter for under $1.5 billion, let alone a lander or a submarine probe. (Warning! This is only my recollection from presentations 6 months ago.)

Re:Contamination

[rilister]

whoah there! 'fraid you've been misled by the lousy headline. If you'd got to the story synopsis, you'd see it was a *European* mission, which Russia is contributing to. It's called 'Laplace' (a curiously French name for a 'Russian mission', huh?) and will be launched by the ESA - European Space Agency in 2015ish.

Now how much you trust those dirty Europeans is a different matter...