Chahat, N. E. (2021, July 21). No Antenna Could Survive Europa’s Brutal, Radioactive Environment—Until Now. IEEE Spectrum: Technology, Engineering, and Science News. https://spectrum.ieee.org/aerospace/space-flight/no-antenna-could-survive-europas-brutal-radioactive-environment-until-now.
No Antenna Could Survive Europa’s Brutal, Radioactive Environment—Until Now
To explore Jupiter’s moon for signs of life, JPL developed a brand new, all-metal design
Image: Marek Denko/Noemotion
My summary of the article:
Europa, one of many moons orbiting Jupiter, is believed to have an immense amount of liquid water underneath its thick icy surface, the evidence for this claim being observations of extremely high plumes of water sprouting from its icy surface. Due to this unique environmental characteristic, many scientists pick Europa as one of the most likely extraterrestrial body to be home for alien life. After all, 'liquid' water is believed to be the ultimate solvent for complex chemistry that may give rise to living creatures.
Why then do scientists in space agencies such as NASA immediately begin an investigation to observe what is going on in Europa? The greatest challenge that these space agencies face is the harsh surface environment of Europa that makes it merely impossible for any device – such as a robot lander that records and sends back information, data, and photos – to operate. Transmission of information is arguably the most important function, since without this capability there is no reason to send an otherwise fully operating lander. To enable this function in Europa's harsh environment, researchers at NASA's JPL (Jet Propulsion Laboratory) have engineered an innovative communication device that seems to be able to operate in Europa.
The device had to solve mainly three challenges originating from Europa's harsh environment. Firstly, the device cannot be large (and/or heavy) since the lack of a thick atmosphere in Europa meant that a parachute cannot be used to land the device safely on Europa's surface, and so the device instead has to use rocket thrust to land on Europa, and this necessitates a large amount of rocket fuel (that for launching from Earth at the first place + that for landing on Europa). And thus, secondly, the device has to be efficient (able to operate with minimum power input), since one with a poor efficiency would necessitate the use of large, heavy power systems with would add the load of the device as a whole. Lastly, it has to be able to withstand the immense amount of ionisation originating from the largest planet in the solar system.
Engineers at JPL eventually solves these problems with innovative ideas across many fields, such as using genetic algorithm to create an optimised design for a single-feed, circular optimised signal and using aluminium unit cells. After multiple testings in extreme environments that mimic that of Europa, the researchers feel confident that the communication system that they have created would not only be successful on the planned mission to Europa in 2024, but also be used in missions to other hostile extraterrestrial environments such as but not confined to Mars.
My response to the article:
Perhaps I was ignorant to have never considered communication to be a key problem that must be addressed in missions to extraterrestrial bodies. As Chahat, the writer of tis article, has said, without a perfected communication technology, other fancy gadgets mounted on the lander such as those used for taking high quality photos or transportation will be utterly useless, since the purpose of these missions is not to ensure that the lander 'survives', but rather to let the lander survive on such hostile environment 'such that they transmit important information about the planet (or moon) back to Earth'.
With this in mind, I believe the significance of the work done by JPL on the Europa lander communication system extends far beyond just that one mission. Since Europa's surface is one of the most hostile environments in the solar system, the team had to deal with pretty much every technological problem that might occur on an extraterrestrial body – from cold temperatures and high ionisation rates to large communication distances and the lack of atmosphere. With this in mind, as mentioned by themselves, there is no reason for JPL's work to not be used elsewhere. In fact, I believe their prototype that will be used in the 2024 Europa mission will be the historic start of many future models that are going to be developed and upgraded from what will be learnt from the first mission and be used in other extraterrestrial exploration missions. Who knows? Maybe a few decades later, we may be sending probes and landers to planets outside our own solar system and receiving high quality photos of those unknown terrains.