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

Watch out for monoliths

[CambodiaSam]

Aren't they a bit behind schedule? I thought this was going to happen in a couple years.

Oh wait, that wasn't a documentary was it...

Re:Watch out for monoliths

[plover]

Sure, the aliens tell us "ALL THESE WORLDS ARE YOURS, EXCEPT EUROPA. ATTEMPT NO LANDINGS THERE", and which moon is the first one the Russians are heading for? Exactly.

At least they can't say they weren't warned.

Not sure how this fits...

[explosivejared]

Hey go for it, we should all support going into space as this planet is screwed.

Everyone knows that in Soviet Russia, mother nature screws you... so that sort of environmentalist talk is uncalled for.

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

[mathfeel]

I say, let them land. This country needs another Sputnik to remind us that the rest of the world's S&T will still go forward while we "debate" such items as ID v.s. evolution.

Re:Nasa Needs Outside Competition

[Opportunist]

Just claim you found life there, the males looking like tentacle monsters and the females like schoolgirls, and the Japanese will be ready to launch in less than 2 years. :)

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:NIH

[Kozar_The_Malignant]

If they some day find life, how do they know they haven't brought it from here on their missions?

If the life is based on DNA/RNA replication using L-amino acids you might think of contamination or panspermia. On the other hand, if it is based on a completely different chemistry from anything on Earth, you can be pretty sure it's alien. On the gripping hand, if it's somewhere in between, you have to consider all the possibilities including convergent evolution.

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

[HappyHead]

Yes, but you realize that this means one important thing:
Even if there wasn't life on Europa before they look for it, there will be once they've found it.
And 10 million years from now, the Europan flibbity-wumpus people will argue with eachother over whether life arose there spontaneously, or was "seeded" from space.

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...

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: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.)