Explore Europa Campaign

Sadly, NASA has been beat up pretty bad by the hurricane season ending today. Other problems have occurred, i.e., the recurring foam problem on the orbiter's fuel tank, new directions from the current administration, and the cancellation of the "Prometheus" endeavor, which was to bring nuclear power to outer planetary exploration, beyond large supplies of solar power, it was lost in cutbacks as NASA recovers from these recent problems. One of the wonderful facts of the Solar System is that there is a moon larger than a planet! At least one anyway, Ganymede, the largest of Jupiter's satellites, is larger than the planet Mercury! Europa, the 4th largest of Jupiter's satellites, is covered with a smooth shell of frozen water. One of the objectives of the "Prometheus" project was to explore Jupiter's Europa, where below the kilometers of ice on its surface, may be more water than on all the Earth, and perhaps some form of life, water thought necessary for its survival, and forms of life recently found in Earth's deep oceans, at unbelievable pressures and temperatures, once thought impossible, have totally surprised scientists. The Planetary Society is recovering from a recent "Solar Sail" test launch failure, the launch was on an un-upgraded Russian missile (it was overlooked in the assembly) fired from a Russian submarine, and is stating that a "mission to Europa should be of the highest priority at the world's space agencies." It would, "unite the world's spacefaring nations and the most talented scientists and engineers in developing a mission to this intriguing moon and advance humankind's exploration of our cosmos." As one sitting in the classroom of "Planetary Atmospheres" when the Mars Viking mission landed and sampled that planet for life, and later at the Jupiter Voyager fly-by pictures, Stony Brook University then involved with those and other explorations (i.e., the expedition to Antarctica to study the "ozone problem" within the Astronomy Dept.) I could not agree more.