Space exploration has undergone a qualitative transformation in the last few years, with a flurry of high-profile innovative missions being launched, each one breaking new ground.
The last couple of days have seen two exciting space events. Elon Musk’s SpaceX achieved possibly the most stunning feat in recent years when one of its rockets, on its return journey to Earth, was caught mid-air by the large mechanical arms of its launch tower, demonstrating a major advance towards realising the goal of a fully reusable rocket. Two days later, NASA’s Europa Clipper mission embarked on a long journey to Europa, one of several moons of Jupiter, to investigate one of the most likely places for extra-terrestrial life in the solar system.
Space exploration has undergone a qualitative transformation in the last few years, with a flurry of high-profile innovative missions being launched, each one breaking new ground. Decades of relatively silent exploration and technology development have resulted in capabilities that now enable space agencies, including private players like SpaceX, to aim for what seemed futuristic just a few years ago. Though a mission to Jupiter is nothing new, and there have been other spacecraft that have travelled further into space, the Europa Clipper mission is special. It has the first realistic chance of encountering life beyond the Earth, or more accurately, encountering conditions that have a high probability of sustaining life. Europa is one of the few places in the solar system — a moon of Saturn is another candidate — suspected of having a large salty ocean beneath the surface, similar to those on Earth.
The Europa Clipper mission may or may not find hints of such life on Europa, but this is just the sort of space mission that fires imaginations. The mission is just the start of humankind’s quest of finding extra-planetary cousins in the universe.
