Keith Cooper is a freelance science journalist and editor in the United Kingdom, and has a degree in physics and astrophysics from the University of Manchester.
"With suitable instrumentation, such as the SUrface Dust Analyzer on NASA's Europa Clipper space probe, it might be easier than we thought to find life, or traces of it, on icy moons," said Frank Postberg of Freie Universität Berlin in aThe first dedicated mission to this frozen Jovian moon, Europa Clipper is currently scheduled to blast-off in October 2024.
Composite images showing water plumes spraying off Europa as seen by the Hubble Space Telescope in 2014 and 2016. More pertinently to the Europa Clipper's potential for finding such life, the bacteria"are extremely small, so they are in theory capable of fitting into ice grains that are emitted from an ocean world like Enceladus or Europa," said Klenner in the statement.
"We have shown that even a tiny fraction of cellular material could be identified by a mass spectrometer on board a spacecraft," said Klenner."Our results give us more confidence that using upcoming instruments, we will be able to detect lifeforms similar to those on Earth, which we increasingly believe could be present on ocean-bearing moons."
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