NASA apparently never got the memo....
Is it habitable? NASA outlines big goals for a mission to Europa.
“Europa is the most likely place in our solar system beyond Earth to have life today, and a landed mission would be the best way to search for signs of life,” said Robert Pappalardo, the study's lead author, based at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in a release. “If one day humans send a robotic lander to the surface of Europa, we need to know what to look for and what tools it should carry.”
There have been a number of our spacecraft to do fly-bys in recent years only piquing scientists interests and speculation
that Europa, which is just smaller than Earth’s moon, might have a vast, liquid ocean tucked under an ice-covered surface. And even more intriguing to scientists are the brownish-red lines sketched over the moon: scientists have proposed that the red patches could indicate ocean water welling up in cracks in the moon’s surface – water that, scientists have said, could be a possible venue for microbial life.
So, with the success of various Martian rovers and the awesome work already shown by Curiosity, sending a similar rover to Europa is a natural next step.
“A future landed mission to Europa would offer a unique opportunity to sample and observe the surface, directly addressing the goal of understanding Europa's habitability by confirming the existence and determining the characteristics of water within and below Europa's icy shell and evaluating the processes that have affected Europa,” write the scientists in the paper.
Some think that
rover needs to be submersible
"When we speak of the Europa mission at our shop we are talking about going for the gold ring: landing on the surface of Europa; sending a nuclear-powered cryobot carrier vehicle through the ice crust; discharging a nuclear-powered 'fast mover' autonomous underwater carrier vehicle that has planet-scale range, and selectively launching a series of miniaturized, highly intelligent AUVs [Autonomous Underwater Vehicles] to go into the more dangerous areas (e.g. around black smokers, up into ice cracks, into corrosive chemical plumes) to search for and collect biological samples and bring them back to the mother ship," Stone Aerospace CEO Bill Stone wrote told SPACE.com in an email.
Yes, I think we should try.
Awesome photos of Jupiter
It might cost nearly 8 months of War on Drugs funding - $12-14 billion dollars, but since it would be based on real science and require actual scientific research that answers real-world questions accurately, that would be money well-spent. Since we are totally wasting that money, it would be prudent to spend it on something positive.
Projects like this build knowledge and technology and generally have the opportunity or potential to help all of humanity, without needlessly enriching the already-rich, stomping on our rights, or hurting anybody on purpose.