NASA's Big Astrobiology Mission To Europa Makes No Mention Of Astrobiology
Keith’s note: NASA JPL issued a press release on Monday titled “Mission to Jupiter’s Icy Moon Confirmed“. Great news for the Astrobiology community as noted by the release – except that the NASA Astrobiology website linked to in this release makes no mention of this news (maybe they will on Tuesday).
But if you go to the link featured in today’s NASA JPL press release about Europa Clipper – you know the “astrobiology” mission that is going to Europa to search for possible indications of life etc., Astrobiology is nowhere to be found. I looked throughout the entire europa.nasa.gov website. The word “astrobiology” is never mentioned once. The only related term is used to describe several participating scientist as being an “astrobiologist”. But “life” – as in the search for – shows up more than a hundred times. Nor is any link provided to NASA’s Astrobiology program.
Why is that?
How is it that NASA’s 20+ year old program – one that recognized by the National Academies of Science in multiple reports and mentioned by name in congressional legislation – cannot be mentioned on the official NASA website for a mission that is overtly Astrobiology-themed? It really does look like one part of NASA does not know and/or does not seem to care what other parts of NASA are doing. If NASA cannot coordinate the interaction between some of its basic programs and organizations regarding this billion dollar mission how is the public is going to fully understand what this mission will do – and how other related work that NASA does in Astrobiology relates to it?
– NASA Makes Big Astrobiology Mission Announcement Without Saying “Astrobiology”
– NASA Leads The World In Astrobiology. Wow, Who Knew?, earlier post
– NASA Can’t Figure Out What Astrobiology Is – Or Who Does It, earlier post
– NASA Is Incapable Of Explaining How It Does Astrobiology, earlier post
– NASA’s Astrobiology Program Works Hard To Ignore Itself, earlier post
– NASA’s Astrobiology Programs Ignore One Another, earlier post
– NASA Leads In Astrobiology. It Needs To Act That Way., earlier post
Europa Clipper is not “going to Europa to search for possible indications of life” and will not carry instruments capable of finding life. It’s all about the subsurface ocean. Of course, the reason people are interested in that ocean is about the potential for life. But the mission isn’t going to directly detect life. In related discussions, many scientists have worried that, if you say a mission is about finding life, and it does not produce a clear yes/no answer, it will be regarded as a failure. I think the Europa Clipper project is going out of it’s way not to promise anything they can’t deliver on.
Best to just call it a space mission, period. Detailed words just clutter up the page and set unreasonable expectations.
Lose the Europa label; it might miss.
In fact, better lose the space part too. Might not reach space.
Sheesh.
I just spent three days at a workshop on accessing the ocean within Europa and an Outer Planets Assessment Group meeting. Trust me, the scientists in this field make a very strong distinction between searching for places where life is possible, and searching for life itself. One person at the meeting even made a good point about saying “extant” life. She said that technically means the bugs in your sample are currently alive. Viking was a search for extant life. If the bugs in the sample had died a year ago, during a hard winter, the Viking experiments couldn’t have detected them. And, with the next Decadal Survey on the horizon, the scientists in the field are being very careful and particular about how they use words like “astrobiology.” I think they would be fine with calling Europa Clipper an “Ocean World” mission; calling it an “astrobiology” mission would start argument.
In addition, as I said before, there will be no biological instruments on the spacecraft. It’s going to tell you things like how salty the ocean is, and what salts are in it. It’s not going to tell you if there are bugs in it. That would be for a follow-on mission, perhaps one called Pequod.
Then why does the word “life” appear 156 times on the Europa Clipper web page?
Which web page? The mission has several (as you’ve pointed out, NASA is into redundancy between mission pages at JPL, headquarters and other locations.) I can’t find one with 156 mentions of “life.” In any case, the ones I’ve seen aren’t about studying life, per se. They are statements like studying “an ocean of liquid water beneath its icy crust and which could host conditions favorable for life” or “see whether the icy moon could harbor conditions suitable for life” or “search for oases that could support life.” That’s physical and chemical oceanography, not biology. Is the mission interesting to astrobiologists? Sure. But so is the abiotic, chemical reaction between water and olivine, to produce methane and hydrogen. Would it have been nice if the Clipper press releases mentioned astrobiology _without_ claiming they were doing it? Probably, but I have tons of other, stylistic differences with the people who write press releases.
The “Mission to Jupiter’s Icy Moon Confirmed” mentions “insights into astrobiology”, “the potential for life on other worlds”, and “even life elsewhere”.
There be whales here!
Funny it didn’t mention Juno.
Well, one reason may be the longstanding NASA PAO, er, Communications policy that no words above a sixth grade level be used in a release. And six-syllable words…. tut, tut.