Year: 2024
Type: article
Abstract: NASA’s Europa Clipper mission is designed to provide a diversity of measurements to further our understanding of the potential habitability of this intriguing ocean world. The Europa mission’s Ultraviolet Spectrograph (Europa-UVS), built at the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), is primarily a “plume finder” and tenuous atmosphere investigation. The science objectives of Europa-UVS are to: 1) Search for and characterize any current activity, notably plumes; and 2) Characterize the composition and sources of volatiles to identify the signatures of non-ice materials, including organic compounds, in the atmosphere and local space environment. Europa-UVS observes photons in the 55–206 nm wavelength range at moderate spectral and spatial resolution along a 7.5° slit composed of 7.3°×0.1° and 0.2°×0.2° contiguous sections. A variety of observational techniques including nadir pushbroom imaging, disk scans, stellar and solar occultations, Jupiter transit observations, and neutral cloud/plasma torus stares are employed to perform a comprehensive study of Europa’s atmosphere, plumes, surface, and local space environment. This paper describes the Europa-UVS investigation’s science plans, instrument details, concept of operations, and data formats in the context of the Europa Clipper mission’s primary habitability assessment goals.
Source: Space Science Reviews
Authors: K. D. Retherford, T. M. Becker, G. R. Gladstone, T. K. Greathouse, M. W. Davis, M. A. Velez, M. A. Freeman, S. M. Brooks, S. Ferrell, R. S. Giles, A. R. Hendrix, V. Hue, E. Johnson, J. A. Kammer, A. D. Marinan, B. D Mamo, M. A. McGrath, P. M. Molyneux, E. G. Nerney, B. Perez, K. B. Persson, S. Pope, U. Raut, R. Rickerson, L. Roth, J. Saur, O. H. W Siegmund, J. R. Spencer, A. J. Steffl, S. A. Stern, B. J. Trantham, M. H. Versteeg, J. Winkenstern, the Europa-UVS Team
Institutions: Southwest Research Institute, The University of Texas at San Antonio, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Planetary Science Institute, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Aix-Marseille Université, Laboratoire d’Astrophysique de Marseille, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, University of Colorado Boulder, Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, University of Cologne
Language: English
Topic: Astro and Planetary Science
Subfield: Astronomy and Astrophysics
Field: Physics and Astronomy
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $4,890
Awards: G357746284, G6172205381
OpenAlex ID: W4404528596