How the fate of Europe's JUICE Jupiter mission depends on the risk of biological contamination

[Admin]

If the huge Jupiter moon Ganymede is more potentially habitable than previously thought, it could alter the end of Europe's JUICE mission.

How the fate of Europe's JUICE Jupiter mission depends on the risk of biological contamination : Read more

 

[cerd]

This article includes some fundamental errors, which clearly falsify the claims made in its title:

First of all COSPAR planetary categories are properties of mission and not of objects. Therefore JUICE’s mission to Europa is category III, its mission to Ganymede is category II. Each of these categories has requirements that need to be fulfilled before being launched. The category of a mission is confirmed at mission CDR and does not change later. Therefore, even in the remote possibility that habitat for potential life is found on Ganymede, JUICE does not have the obligation to change its mission. As a matter of fact, once in Ganymede’s orbit, there is technically no means to avoid landing on its surface. Of course the possibility of a targeted crash could be investigated in such case, should sufficient propellant reserves be available at the time of the finding.
So there is no way this mission is “derailed” as claimed in the article by such potential findings.

 

[John Cooper]

Also, the intrinsic magnetic field of Ganymede comes not from its subsurface water ocean but from its liquid iron core. The perturbation of the total field around the moon by the magnetospheric interaction is what reveals the salty water ocean. Re indigenous biosignatures and any infectious organisms from a crashing spacecraft like Juice, these would be preserved longer in the equatorial zone where the intrinsic dipole field deflects away "killer" electrons (Cooper et al., Icarus, 2001) from the jovian magnetosphere. So that may offset the greater thickness of ice over the subsurface ocean and be a factor in the decision between categories II and III for Juice.