Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
The Obama administration is proposing an $18.5 billion budget for NASA in 2016, an increase of about $500 million in funding for the US space agency over this year.
NASA unveiled its 2016 fiscal year budget estimates during a Monday briefing, and according to the Washington Post, many key projects will continue to receive full funding – including the in-development Orion capsule and Space Launch System rocket, the James Webb Space Telescope (which is scheduled to launch in 2018) and the Commercial Crew Program.
The Commercial Crew Program, the program in which NASA awarded contracts to SpaceX and Boeing towards the development of domestically-built spacecraft that will be used to transport American astronauts to the International Space Station, will receive $1.2 billion – a $400 billion increase from fiscal year 2015, according to various media reports.
The budget also indicates that the agency plans to move forward with its controversial Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARM), in which a robotic satellite will capture and carry a small asteroid into orbit around the moon. Provided those efforts are successful, NASA astronauts would then travel to the asteroid by 2020 as a step towards the ultimate goal of reaching Mars.
We’re going to Europa (?)
Interestingly enough, Popular Science reports the budget also reveals a trip to Jupiter’s moon Europa is pretty much a done deal. The mission is listed amongst the $5.288 billion of the budget allocated to science research, and involves $1.361 billion for a unmanned mission to the moon to see if the vast oceans buried beneath its icy crust are home to organic lifeforms.
Casey Dreier, a blogger at The Planetary Society, called the commitment to a Europa mission “the most exciting feature of the president’s 2016 budget request for NASA,” and Sara Susca, payload systems engineer with the Europa Clipper mission, told UPI that her team was “really looking forward to next spring when, hopefully, we’ll become another flagship mission.”
The Europa Clipper concept, Discovery News explained, is something that has been in the works at NASA for quite a while. It will consist of a spacecraft that will orbit Jupiter and make an estimated 45 flybys of the moon’s surface over a period of three years – similar to the way that the Cassini spacecraft in orbit around Saturn has carried out flybys of its moon Titan.
The sub-surface ocean on Europa holds three times as much H2O as the oceans here on Earth, and astrobiologists believe that it might hold life within its 62-mile (100 kilometer) deep waters. It is comparable to the Mariana Trench, the deepest region of the Pacific Ocean, where complex biology has managed to evolve in depths of 6.8 miles (11 kilometers), the website said.
Understanding habitability
While the scientists report that Europa has the liquid water, heat source and possible nutrient cycling capable of supporting life, their mission is not designed specifically to find it. Rather, as Kevin Hand, JPL’s Deputy Chief Scientist for Solar System Exploration pointed out in a media briefing on Monday, their goal is “to understand habitability; the ingredients for life.”
A surface mission would be required to actually look for life on the Jovian moon, he added, and such an endeavor is currently beyond NASA’s technological capability. The Europa Clipper spacecraft could be ready to launch within the next decade, Discovery News said, and once it is ready, NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) could carry it to the moon in less than three years.
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