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

Nasa Needs Outside Competition

[StCredZero]

NASA needs outside competition. Otherwise, they just devolve to being a big pork-barrel project for Houston Texas and defense contractors. Outside competition got us to the moon. Maybe it will get us to Mars and Jupiter?

Re:Nasa Needs Outside Competition

[Nyeerrmm]

I'd actually argue that the high profile competition with the Soviets caused the current state of the US space program. We rushed to the moon in a completely unsustainable way, and needed something to do afterwards that would be high profile but much cheaper, and most importantly involve men (eliminating the possibility of probes counting as high profile). This led to the technological budget monster that is the STS, which is fundamentally flawed (combining heavy lifter with person carrier), and is overly complex for what little it really does. That said I have a little hope for the new architecture (Orion+Ares) because it fixes the architectural flaws, leaving only the managerial ones.... but I digress.

If there had been no Soviet competition it may have taken us 10 or 20 years longer to get to the moon, or we may have decided to skip it all together, and gone to Mars or asteroids instead. However, whatever we did, it seems likely that it wouldn't have been simple flags and footprints, but instead would have been more along the lines of what Von Braun and the others had really been going for, with longer stays eventually leading to permanent habitation. Because there would never have been as large of an investment, there would never have been the budget fatigue, and the space program, whatever form it took, would have been better at using limited resources to fulfill its goals.

Of course, predicting what might have happened is hard, but I still think that that very strong competition was ultimately harmful. Of course, this kind of lower-key competition doesn't carry the same dangers.

Err, waitaminute...

[Penguinisto]

Wasn't there some sort of Internationally-recognized moratorium about landing on Europa, for fear of potential bacteriological contamination?

Forget the Arthur. C. Clarke meme... I'm speaking as in a for-real 'we ain't going there yet' agreement that space-faring nations had agreed to, at least until they can come up with some sort of exploration set-up that can search for life there without risk (or at least an acceptably minimized risk) of contaminating the underlying ocean with Earth-borne bacteria.

I could've sworn that there was something in place to that effect... sort of the same reason why the Russians held off from their efforts to drill all the way down to Lake Vostok in Antarctica.

/P

Re:Err, waitaminute...

[Anonymous Coward]

There have been a lot of concerns raised, but no exclusions. The spacecraft that discovered the oceans, Galileo, was burnt up in Jupiter's atmosphere to eliminate the small possibility that it crash into Europa and spread bacteria that it likely carried from earth, since it wasn't sterilized. You can bet that there will be ample pressure from inside the science community to clean any probe sent to a degree beyond even what the Mars landers are cleansed.

The concern is that biological contamination could taint any scientific observations (was that bacteria native and therefore life did develop independently on another planet or did we screw up and bring it from earth? Is this compound naturally occuring or a metabolic product of this stupid bacteria we brought from earth? etc.).

If you never observe the planet at that level, the concern is a moot point, so it's nonsense to flat-out ban sending a lander. We do want to be darn sure, however, that we don't screw up future studies.

Contamination

[hyades1]

Everything I've seen so far indicates it will be incredibly difficult and expensive to thoroughly decontaminate a spacecraft in order to ensure that Earth-based organisms don't "piss on the Petri Dish". The Russians are notorious for cutting corners, and their prime motivation for this exercise is political. The chance that they'll spend the extra millions of dollars to ensure the sterility of a Europa lander is non-existent.

I see a serious potential for compromising what appears to be one of the better spots in the solar system to look for extraterrestrial life.

Re:Contamination

[Opportunist]

Wouldn't it be kind of funny if "God" was just some alien space probe engineer who sneezed on the probe before launch?

Re:Contamination

[bitrex]

You should really read physicist Richard Feynman's report on the Challenger disaster for an honest analysis of what lead to that orbiter's destruction. There's also a good list of myths about the disaster that's worth reading - for example the belief that Reagan's state of the union had anything to do with the disaster.

Launch officials clearly felt pressure to get the mission off after repeated delays, and they were embarrassed by repeated mockery on the television news of previous scrubs, but the driving factor in their minds seems to have been two shuttle-launched planetary probes. The first ever probes of this kind, they had an unmovable launch window just four months in the future. The persistent rumor that the White House had ordered the flight to proceed in order to spice up President Reagan's scheduled State of the Union address seems based on political motivations, not any direct testimony or other first-hand evidence. Feynman personally checked out the rumor and never found any substantiation. If Challenger's flight had gone according to plan, the crew would have been asleep at the time of Reagan's speech, and no communications links had been set up.

Feynman's Appendix to the Rogers Commission Report on the Space Shuttle Challenger Accident

7 myths about the Challenger shuttle disaster

Re:Commander Taco should read the summary

[curmudgeon99]

The hell it is European! You going to Europa on an Ariane? Not likely. This will be launched from Baikonaur using the large Energia boosters. This is 95% Russian and the Russkies deserve the credit. Anybody can make a little jacky rover to go look around. GETTING there is the problem.