Science of the Europa Lander Mission Concept

Abstract

1 khand@jpl.nasa.gov, 626-487-5379. This research was carried out at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (80NM0018D0004). The information presented about the Europa Lander mission concept is pre-decisional and is provided for planning and discussion purposes only. Along with the Science Definition Team and pre-Project Science Team listed above, an additional 146 scientists joined as co-signers on this paper (full list available upon request). The demographics of the primary disciplines represented by the signatories of this paper are shown below. As can be seen, this mission concept engages and includes the interests of not just physicists and geologists, but also many biologists and chemists. The engineers are primarily represented by instrument developers who are working with scientists to develop instrumentation for the model payload. Information on subdisciplines (e.g., planetary science, astrobiology, microbiology, geobiology, oceanography, etc.) is also available.