Sure.
Yeah.
The Europa Clipper mission is launching tomorrow to,
go on a six year long journey to Europa
to explore this unique ocean world and try to understand
its habitability.
Yeah, so Europa is a really unique place.
It is in many ways similar
to things that we know here on Earth and in other ways, very strange.
So it has a global ocean.
And we're used to understanding oceans, and it has a seafloor
and it's covered in ice.
These are all things we're kind of familiar with.
But what's really unique about Europa is that ocean
is more than 100km deep.
Much deeper than anything we've ever known here on Earth.
And it's completely covered by an ice shell that's up
to tens of kilometers thick.
So that's very foreign to us.
And so we really want to go explore that.
So Europa Clipper mission is going to go to Europa
with state of the art instrumentation to try and revisit places
we have seen before, with other spacecraft and get new data
at much higher resolution, both exploring the surface
and the subsurface to try and understand
Europa better.
The Europa
Clipper spacecraft has a suite of instruments
that will explore, from its very surface to its deep interior.
Things like a camera, which we all know, but spectrometers to understand
its composition, magnetometers to understand the magnetic field
and what that tells us about the ocean that's deep in its interior.
And a radar to look at that ice shell,
not just at the surface, but down below.
My role is to study the surface
geology of Europa and also its interior structure.
And in that role, I serve on both the camera team
for Europa Clipper and the radar team.
I'm really most
excited about exploring the geology of Europa
and trying to understand how that connects to its potential for habitability.