The Mission

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by David W. Brown


  What makes life on Europa so compelling a subject to consider is that, unlike what might one day be discovered on Mars, Europan life has a real chance at complexity. Sure, Martian microbes would be thrilling—they would transform biology and finally give astrobiologists something to do at all those conferences. But . . . they are at least slightly disappointing next to a space guppy. Were scientists to discover a Europan creature that wiggles, it would not be long before they would get one in a lab. As John Culberson astutely asserts, no discovery would so mobilize and orient NASA; whichever world offers up life first for our probes would be the world to attract a generation of exploration. But by what right do we proceed? The first discovery of the first living organism off of Earth will also mark the first time that humans—earthlings—present themselves practically to the cosmos. Are we an invasive species? Are we allowed to slice open that Jovian jellyfish? Would one deep-fry a Europan squid with the same relish as its terrestrial counterpart?

  Europa’s proximity complicates everything. In a universe with one septillion stars, sure, even the hardened skeptic of alien life can grant that maybe the set of circumstances that happened here happened also on some other planet in some other solar system. But if whatever happened here happened two planets over? And not even on an Earth-like world—that fantastical, waterlogged Venus—but rather, on a little ice ball circling a giant hydrogen hurricane sphere? We would not be the only house cat in the world. We would not even be the only house cat in the house. If genesis occurred two times in three planets, then habitability is not likely an aberration, and Earth is not some lonely cactus in a vast, indifferent desert; it is a blade of grass in a sweeping, verdant meadow.

  The ambition of the Europa mission studies and the implications regarding religion were not missed by Ron Greeley. In June 2003, while leading a JIMO science definition team meeting, someone asked: “Will this mission answer the question ‘Is there a God?’”

  “Yes,” said Greeley. “But it is priority two.”519

  BOB PAPPALARDO STOOD in the front of the room. One hundred fifty faces stared back. There was a time when everyone on the Europa team could fit in the back of Il Fornaio. There was a time when the team could fit in a single booth in a Thai restaurant. Now they were in the basement auditorium of Gavin Tower, room B20, Building 321, as in 3-2-1-liftoff, and . . . they had made it. They had grown by an order of magnitude overnight.

  August 4, 2015.

  Sixteen years earlier, he was a postdoctoral researcher—Lieutenant Junior Grade Spock of the spacecraft Galileo—and published a paper pondering a subsurface ocean on Europa. It would have been illogical to commit wholeheartedly one way or the other, and he ladled the article with lines such as “no definitive evidence” and “viable, but unproven”—was unwilling, even, to say that such an ocean existed in the recent past, though he granted that “warm, low-viscosity material at shallow depths” played some role at some point in shaping Europa’s geology.520 Anything more, and you were just being foolhardy—cavalier—audacious—brazen—snotty—insolent. But while he was hesitant in journals, he just knew, and he tipped his hand in interviews at the time. Spock, after all, was half human.

  Three years before that paper, Pappalardo published another asserting the geological evidence of “solid-state convection” in Europa’s ice shell: that beneath the granite-hard surface, cold ice sank ever deeper in the ice shell, and warm ice rose, in a slow dance over hundreds of millions of years.521 Maybe there was an ocean beneath it. Maybe there wasn’t. Who’s to say!

  But now it was no longer “What if there were an ocean . . .” It was “My God; what if it were habitable?” Now he was Captain Kirk of the Europa Clipper, and he was going to find out for sure. They were met in Building 321 for PSG-1: the first project science group meeting of the Europa Multiple Flyby Mission. Not a concept. Not a study. Not a pre-project. It was official. All of it.

  Well, not the name. Oh, they still called it Europa Clipper, though NASA headquarters hated it so. It was, officially—for now—the inelegant yet precise Europa Multiple Flyby Mission. But every time Joan wrote a decision memo for the project back at headquarters, she wrote in “Europa Clipper.” And every time, someone changed it back: “Europa Multiple Flyby Mission”—what Curt called the Europa mf’n mission. But Joan was possessed of arachnid patience. She wasn’t going anywhere, and her plan was this: she would wait out everyone. Agency leadership arrived and departed as though headquarters were Heathrow, and sooner or later, their replacements wouldn’t know any better—wouldn’t know how headquarters honchos once hated the name—loathed it, really—fought for years to prevent it—and would one day sign what Joan had written right there in black and white: “Europa Clipper.” And once it said Europa Clipper in a signed memo, it would, officially, be called Europa Clipper.522 Just like that! So let it be written, so let it be done.

  Those hundred and fifty faces facing Bob belonged to the project management team and the teams of each of the nine instruments selected for flight. Nine! An actual science payload, contracts signed, budgets written, money spent. 1. An ice-penetrating radar to see what exactly was happening inside of Europa’s ice shell, and how it interfaced with the ocean, led by Don Blankenship; 2. a camera suite to image Europa at up to a half-meter resolution; 3. an imaging spectrometer to determine Europa’s composition; 4. a magnetometer to figure out Europa’s ocean; 5. a plasma instrument that would work in conjunction with the magnetometer in doing ocean science; 6. a thermal imager—a “heat detector” for finding extant and active geologic areas on Europa, such as the eruption sites of plumes; 7. a mass spectrometer to measure Europa’s atmosphere and any material ejected therein; and 8. and 9. an ultraviolet spectrometer and a dust detector: two instruments that had not been previously part of the Europa Clipper straw man payload. The latter two instruments were deemed critical by headquarters for flying through prospective plumes and making out their makeup.

  In seventeen years, there had been eighty-five people, cumulatively, on six science definition teams: Europa Orbiter through 1999, JIMO through 2004, Europa Explorer in 2007, the Europa Jupiter System Mission through 2010, the Europa Habitability Mission through 2012, and Europa Clipper through 2014. The faces came and went but for Bob, Dave, Don, and Louise. Many were in the room now, but not all of them. Some, like Ron, were there in spirit, but you just felt Ron’s crushing absence. If only he could have received those joyful emails, first from Louise and then from Curt, disbanding the science definition team—not because the money was gone or because the study was dead—but because the job was done.523

  The team members were released so that they might pursue the instrument announcement of opportunity. “This will be the first time in quite a while,” Curt had written in farewell, “that NASA is bereft of direct scientific input on Europa mission formulation from the community. . . . This group has faced and overcome significant challenges, among them the sheer duration of the effort as well as the programmatic vagaries that have been repeatedly introduced, and I thank you for your steadfastness and the opportunity to work with you.”524

  Two weeks after the SIP, NASA formally requested fifteen million dollars for Europa in its fiscal year 2015 budget.525 It was a crack in the dam, and Congressman John Culberson thought that was cute, picked up a sledgehammer, and smashed the sliver into a yawning breach by appropriating—in law—one hundred million dollars for Europa mission development. Afterward, as predicted, he was made chair of the subcommittee, and when word went out of that triumph, Bob couldn’t help but email some members of the Europa community, “Hang on, it’s gonna get fun!”526

  In January 2015 the ninth floor at NASA headquarters at last committed to the big decisions at the project’s acquisition strategy meeting. Culberson had pushed their hands and was clearly not going anywhere, giving the agency assurance that the mission would not soon be abandoned by Congress for some other shiny object. And so it was settled: after all that, the shrinking and splitting and fusing and
failing and improvising, Clipper would be a flagship-class, two-billion-dollar (in fiscal year 2015 funds) multiple flyby mission. The effort was directed to Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which would lead its development, in conjunction with the Applied Physics Laboratory.

  Europa was made a mission, real and true, on June 17, 2015, with the ratification of Key Decision Point A at NASA headquarters.527 The meeting itself was highly formal, ceremonial, cheerfully solemn. There were presentations to key stakeholders at the agency on what they were buying, what risks would be incurred, what the Europa multiple flyby mission would learn, and how it would change the course of solar system exploration. After the presentations were given, the room was polled.

  —Science Mission Directorate?

  —Go.

  —Office of the Chief Engineer?

  —Go.

  —Chief financial officer?

  —Go.

  —Office of Safety and Mission Assurance?

  —Go.

  —Office of Legislative Affairs?

  —Go.

  —Legal counsel?

  —Go.

  —NASA administrator?

  —Go . . .

  Afterward, Bob, Barry, Joan, and Curt gathered around the signed Key Decision Point A memo as though it were the Declaration of Independence, took photos of it, took photos with it.528 Eleven signatures later, Bob was no longer a Europa study scientist or the Europa pre-project scientist. He was the project scientist of the Europa mission. Yet another bottle from the good widow Clicquot was uncorked that day.

  And now? Now they had to do this thing. There were still so many subtle, specific, detailed decisions to be made. I want to get an image of some section of the surface at a certain resolution—what camera focal length do I need? Do I need a color filter? How close to the surface do I have to be? How slow must we fly so as not to smear that image out? Each element of every little decision affected something else. There was always a trade. During each flyby, the science team wanted every instrument running simultaneously. Could solar power afford it, if the mission went that route? They were great, but my God, those panels were big. They launched folded and had to be deployed. They degraded over time. The mass spectrometer, the particle and magnetic field instruments, the dust detector—they needed an environment of a certain cleanliness—you needed to know that they were measuring Europa and not something radiated by the spacecraft. There were data rate questions: What kind of compression were they going to settle on? (You couldn’t forget the lessons of Galileo!) Was the antenna going to be big enough to get those data back to Earth before the next Europa encounter? They had to start figuring out trajectories. Each instrument had its preferred pathway in orbit; some might want the Europan equator, and some might want the poles, and all of that would have to be negotiated across forty-plus flybys. Would those massive radar booms interfere with the field of view of the narrow-angle camera? You can’t have a boom in your FOV! They still had to work out how each instrument would react with every other, and with the components of the spacecraft, and how they would interact with the Jovian environment, and how all of those interactions affected the science measurements, and—

  Everything had always been notional! This is what we want. They were now, at long, long last, in this-is-what-we-need territory.

  Six weeks after the mission was made official, the full team, the hundred and fifty, gathered as one for the very first time. Bob had just gotten married, and planning the project science group meeting was a lot like planning his wedding (and included many of the same people). He drew heavily on his brief and rocky tenure as project scientist of Cassini. He knew that the same scientist on two different missions tended to act differently on each, that it was the mission’s personality that elicited or stifled certain behaviors, which in turn fed back into the mission, repeating. So it was important to Bob to establish Europa Clipper’s demeanor from the first. They were one team.

  And since headquarters hadn’t yet approved the name of the mission, they needed . . . something. They needed a totem, a symbol. Something around which they could gather, rally. Something to call their own.

  And the answer was obvious.

  A monolith.529

  That big black slab of perfect proportions from 2001: A Space Odyssey. The same mysterious monument that transformed life on Europa in 2010: Odyssey Two. Five years earlier, Rob Lock, the project system engineer of Europa Explorer and the Jupiter Europa Orbiter, sent Bob an email with a facetious Monolith “action” figure being sold online. (“It has 0 points of articulation, so you don’t have to worry about it bending in half or anything. It will help your paperclips, your stapler, even your tape dispenser evolve into sentient life forms. So long as your desk isn’t on Europa. ’Cause you gotta leave Europa alone.”530)

  So Bob would buy one. Not an action figure (though he did buy one of those), but a life-sized Kubrick-Clarke-beguile-and-evolve-the-caveman monolith. Thankfully, when you need a monolith in a hurry, there is no better place to live than Los Angeles, and you ask friends who work in theater and film. Steve Vance, an astrobiologist at the lab, was married to Sara Fenton, an actress and filmmaker who in turn knew Emiliano “Emi” Rios, a Hollywood production designer.531 The two discussed it, Bob and Emi, and Emi, it turned out, really knew his monoliths. (If the dimensions weren’t exact, after all, it wouldn’t be a monolith; it would just be a rectangle.) Emi even researched how Kubrick’s original was made.532 The monolith would be just under 8 feet tall—94.5 inches high, 42 inches wide, and 10.5 inches thick—the proportions are right, Bob—made of medium-density fiberboard and painted in low-gloss black with a pewter metallic tint. Aliens couldn’t have done a better job.

  While that was being built, Bob googled up a 3D-printer monolith model and had key chains made. Written on them:

  EUR

  OPA

  PSG1

  2015

  IT’S

  FULL

  OF

  STARS

  . . . the bottom four words being Dave Bowman’s final, mysterious message in the novel before being whisked away by some alien force and eventually reborn as a starchild.533 The words were even engraved in Gill Sans, the same typeface as seen in the film’s credits. Bob ordered a cake to match the key chains—solid black icing, and, again, in perfect monolith dimensions—but the bakers refused to cut individual cake slices in 1:4:9 dimensions, so Mabel Young, newly wed to Bob, happily handled confectionary responsibilities.

  Look, Bob wasn’t throwing a party here. He organized and outlined to the minute two long days of introductions to Europa, to the Clipper concept, to how changing designs (e.g., going from nuclear to solar) would affect science investigations. They would refine the science traceability matrix and mission science requirements, discuss trajectories, mission operations—it was a crash course in all things ice world science—but there would be years of development before the spacecraft saw space. The earliest it would launch was June 6, 2022. The earliest it would arrive at Jupiter was March 5, 2025. The team stuff, though, could not wait; mattered more, perhaps, than anything at this point in the project.

  It had been a long time coming when Bob began the meeting, and he made a proper production of it.534

  BOB:

  Welcome, everyone, to Europa PSG number one.

  [applause]

  Standby LX Q1

  Oh, yeah, we ask you to silence your cellphones. We’ve been working this a real long time.

  Standby Video Q2

  I appreciate you all being here.

  I hope that this meeting is both informational and enjoyable as well. And let’s start now.

  LX Q1 GO

  [Health state—black]

  LX Video Q2 GO

  [Video intro]

  [Over the sound system: the sunrise fanfare from Richard Strauss’s “Also sprach Zarathustra”—famed from 2001: A Space Odyssey.

  Cccccccccc-Gggggggg-Ccccccccc-EGC-E-flatGCcccccc!

  Standby LX Q3


  Projected on large screen at front of the room, a clip of the film, the sun rising over the Earth.

  The sun reaches its zenith and . . .]

  LX Q3 GO

  [Spotlight stage left]

  [Suddenly, at the front of the room, is an eight-foot MONOLITH.]

  The startled room erupted into cheers and applause at their surprising (and quite imposing) mascot—you just wanted to reach out and touch it!—but that wasn’t all: Bob was now walking forward holding a femur bone, as seen also in the film. (Where does one get a femur bone? From an eBay storefront called Skeletons and More.535) He tossed it toward the screen—the timing was just so—and it was met on the overhead by the femur flung by the ape-man in 2001 . . . only instead of the famous jump cut to an orbital nuclear weapon in space, it cut to Europa Clipper.

  There were too many people present for all the scientists there to introduce themselves and say their interests or instruments, or whatever—you’d have a sleeping auditorium by person sixty-three—so Bob found a better solution. He had each investigation team stand up.

 

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