Spacecraft blasts off to hunt alien life on a distant moon

Published

2 years ago

2024/10/15

Priyan

The strange surface of Europa - captured by Galileo spacecraft in the 1990s

A spacecraft that will hunt for signs of alien life on one of Jupiter’s icy moons has blasted off from Cape Canaveral, Florida.

Nasa launched the spacecraft at 12:06 local time (16:06 GMT) after hurricane Milton forced the mission to postpone plans last week.

Europa Clipper will now travel 1.8 billion miles to reach Europa, a deeply mysterious moon orbiting Jupiter.

It will not arrive until 2030 but what it finds could change what we know about life in our solar system.

Trapped under the moon’s surface could be a vast ocean with double the amount of water on Earth.

The spacecraft is chasing a European mission that left last year, but using a cosmic piggyback, it will overtake and arrive first.

Getty Images The NASA Europa Clipper spacecraft is viewed during a media tour inside a Spacecraft Assembly Facility clean room at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) on April 11, 2024 in Pasadena, California. — *The spacecraft has been developed at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California [BBC]*

Years in the making, the Europa Clipper launch was delayed at the last minute after hurricane Milton blasted Florida this week.

The spacecraft was rushed indoors for shelter, but after checking the launchpad at Cape Canaveral for damage, engineers gave the go-ahead for lift-off at 12:06 local time (16:06 GMT).

“If we discover life so far away from the Sun, it would imply a separate origin of life to the Earth,” says Mark Fox-Powell, a planetary microbiologist at the Open University. “That is hugely significant, because if that happens twice in our solar system, it could mean life is really common,” he says.

Located 628 million kilometres from Earth, Europa is just a bit bigger than our moon, but that is where the similarity ends.

If it was in our skies, it would shine five times brighter because the water ice would reflect much more sunlight.

Its icy crust is up to 25km thick, and sloshing beneath, there could be a vast saltwater ocean. There may also be chemicals that are the ingredients for simple life.

*The spacecraft is just longer than a professional basketball court and weighs around the same as an African elephant [BBC]*

Scientists first realised Europa might support life in the 1970s when, peering through a telescope in Arizona, they saw water ice.

Voyager 1 and 2 spacecrafts captured the first close-up images, and then in 1995 Nasa’s Galileo spacecraft flew past Europa taking some deeply puzzling pictures. They showed a surface riddled with dark, reddish-brown cracks, fractures that may contain salts and sulfur compounds that could support life.

The Hubble space telescope has since taken pictures of what might be plumes of water ejected 100 miles (160 kilometers) above the moon’s surface

But none of those missions got close enough to Europa for long enough to really understand it.

Now scientists hope that instruments on Nasa’s Clipper spacecraft will map almost the entire moon, as well as collect dust particles and fly through the water plumes.

Britney Schmidt, professor of earth and atmospheric sciences at Cornell university in the US, helped to design a laser onboard that will see through the ice.

“I’m most excited about understanding Europa’s plumbing. Where’s the water? Europa has the ice version of Earth’s subduction zones, magma chambers and tectonics – we’re going to try to see into those regions and map them,” she says.

Her instrument, which is called Reason, was tested in Antarctica.

But unlike on Earth, all the instruments on Clipper will be exposed to huge amounts of radiation which Prof Schmidt says is a “major concern.”

The spacecraft should fly past Europa about 50 times, and each time, it will be blasted with radiation equivalent to one million X-rays.

“Much of the electronics are in a vault that’s heavily shielded to keep out radiation,” Prof Schmidt explains.

The spaceship is the largest ever built to visit a planet and has a long journey ahead. Travelling 1.8 billion miles, it will orbit both the Earth and Mars to propel itself further towards Jupiter in what is called the sling-shot effect.

*Europa Clipper will travel for five and a half years to reach Jupiter [BBC}*

It cannot carry enough fuel to motor itself all the way alone, so it will piggyback off the momentum of Earth and Mars’s gravitational pull.

It will overtake JUICE, the European Space Agency’s spaceship that will also visit Europa on its way to another of Jupiter’s moons called Ganeymede.

Once Clipper approaches Europa in 2030 it will switch on its engines again to carefully manoeuvre itself into the right orbit.

$NASA/JPL/DLR This image shows two views of the trailing hemisphere of Jupiter's ice-covered satellite, Europa. The left image shows the approximate natural color appearance of Europa. The image on the right is a false-color composite version combining violet, green and infrared images to enhance color differences in the predominantly water-ice crust of Europa. Dark brown areas represent rocky material derived from the interior, implanted by impact, or from a combination of interior and exterior sources. Bright plains in the polar areas (top and bottom) are shown in tones of blue to distinguish possibly coarse-grained ice (dark blue) from fine-grained ice (light blue). Long, dark lines are fractures in the crust, some of which are more than 3,000 kilometers (1,850 miles) long. The bright feature containing a central dark spot in the lower third of the image is a young impact crater some 50 kilometers (31 miles) in diameter. This crater has been provisionally named "Pwyll" for the Celtic god of the underworld.$

*The left image shows the natural appearance of Europa, and the right image uses colour to highlight the water-ice crust*

Space scientists are very cautious when talking about the chances of discovering life – there is no expectation that they will find human-like creatures or animals.

“We are searching for the potential for habitability and you need four things – liquid water, a heat source, and organic material. Finally those three ingredients need to be stable over a long enough period of time that something can happen,” explains Michelle Dougherty, professor of space physics at Imperial College in London.

And they hope that if they can understand the ice surface better, they will know where to land a craft on a future mission.

An international team of scientists with Nasa, the Jet Propulsion Lab and the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab will oversee the odyssey.

At a time when there is a space launch virtually every week, this mission promises something different, suggests Professor Fox-Powell.

“There’s no profit being made. This is about exploration and curiosity, and pushing back the boundaries of our knowledge of our place in the universe,” he says.

***[BBC]***

Image showing the Europa Clipper spacecraft, and an image of a mapping imaging spectrometer used to analyse infrared light — *The spacecraft has been developed at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California [BBC]*

Years in the making, the Europa Clipper launch was delayed at the last minute after hurricane Milton blasted Florida this week.

The spacecraft was rushed indoors for shelter, but after checking the launchpad at Cape Canaveral for damage, engineers gave the go-ahead for lift-off at 12:06 local time (16:06 GMT).

“If we discover life so far away from the Sun, it would imply a separate origin of life to the Earth,” says Mark Fox-Powell, a planetary microbiologist at the Open University. “That is hugely significant, because if that happens twice in our solar system, it could mean life is really common,” he says.

Located 628 million kilometres from Earth, Europa is just a bit bigger than our moon, but that is where the similarity ends.

If it was in our skies, it would shine five times brighter because the water ice would reflect much more sunlight.

Its icy crust is up to 25km thick, and sloshing beneath, there could be a vast saltwater ocean. There may also be chemicals that are the ingredients for simple life.

*The spacecraft is just longer than a professional basketball court and weighs around the same as an African elephant [BBC]*

Scientists first realised Europa might support life in the 1970s when, peering through a telescope in Arizona, they saw water ice.

Voyager 1 and 2 spacecrafts captured the first close-up images, and then in 1995 Nasa’s Galileo spacecraft flew past Europa taking some deeply puzzling pictures. They showed a surface riddled with dark, reddish-brown cracks, fractures that may contain salts and sulfur compounds that could support life.

The Hubble space telescope has since taken pictures of what might be plumes of water ejected 100 miles (160 kilometers) above the moon’s surface

But none of those missions got close enough to Europa for long enough to really understand it.

Now scientists hope that instruments on Nasa’s Clipper spacecraft will map almost the entire moon, as well as collect dust particles and fly through the water plumes.

Britney Schmidt, professor of earth and atmospheric sciences at Cornell university in the US, helped to design a laser onboard that will see through the ice.

“I’m most excited about understanding Europa’s plumbing. Where’s the water? Europa has the ice version of Earth’s subduction zones, magma chambers and tectonics – we’re going to try to see into those regions and map them,” she says.

Her instrument, which is called Reason, was tested in Antarctica.

But unlike on Earth, all the instruments on Clipper will be exposed to huge amounts of radiation which Prof Schmidt says is a “major concern.”

The spacecraft should fly past Europa about 50 times, and each time, it will be blasted with radiation equivalent to one million X-rays.

“Much of the electronics are in a vault that’s heavily shielded to keep out radiation,” Prof Schmidt explains.

The spaceship is the largest ever built to visit a planet and has a long journey ahead. Travelling 1.8 billion miles, it will orbit both the Earth and Mars to propel itself further towards Jupiter in what is called the sling-shot effect.

*Europa Clipper will travel for five and a half years to reach Jupiter [BBC}*

It cannot carry enough fuel to motor itself all the way alone, so it will piggyback off the momentum of Earth and Mars’s gravitational pull.

It will overtake JUICE, the European Space Agency’s spaceship that will also visit Europa on its way to another of Jupiter’s moons called Ganeymede.

Once Clipper approaches Europa in 2030 it will switch on its engines again to carefully manoeuvre itself into the right orbit.

$NASA/JPL/DLR This image shows two views of the trailing hemisphere of Jupiter's ice-covered satellite, Europa. The left image shows the approximate natural color appearance of Europa. The image on the right is a false-color composite version combining violet, green and infrared images to enhance color differences in the predominantly water-ice crust of Europa. Dark brown areas represent rocky material derived from the interior, implanted by impact, or from a combination of interior and exterior sources. Bright plains in the polar areas (top and bottom) are shown in tones of blue to distinguish possibly coarse-grained ice (dark blue) from fine-grained ice (light blue). Long, dark lines are fractures in the crust, some of which are more than 3,000 kilometers (1,850 miles) long. The bright feature containing a central dark spot in the lower third of the image is a young impact crater some 50 kilometers (31 miles) in diameter. This crater has been provisionally named "Pwyll" for the Celtic god of the underworld.$

*The left image shows the natural appearance of Europa, and the right image uses colour to highlight the water-ice crust*

Space scientists are very cautious when talking about the chances of discovering life – there is no expectation that they will find human-like creatures or animals.

“We are searching for the potential for habitability and you need four things – liquid water, a heat source, and organic material. Finally those three ingredients need to be stable over a long enough period of time that something can happen,” explains Michelle Dougherty, professor of space physics at Imperial College in London.

And they hope that if they can understand the ice surface better, they will know where to land a craft on a future mission.

An international team of scientists with Nasa, the Jet Propulsion Lab and the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab will oversee the odyssey.

At a time when there is a space launch virtually every week, this mission promises something different, suggests Professor Fox-Powell.

“There’s no profit being made. This is about exploration and curiosity, and pushing back the boundaries of our knowledge of our place in the universe,” he says.

***[BBC]***

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Philippine VP Sara Duterte impeached for a second time

Published

47 mins ago

2026/05/11

Priyan

Duterte was impeached on the same grounds in 2025 [BBC]

The Philippine House of Representatives has voted to impeach Vice-President Sara Duterte for a second time, threatening her plan to run for president in 2028.

Monday’s vote moves the impeachment process to the Senate for trial, where if convicted, the daughter of former President Rodrigo Duterte will be disqualified from holding public office.

The 47-year-old is leading early surveys to replace her ally-turned-bitter foe, President Ferdinand Marcos Jr.

The case against the vice-president stemmed from her alleged misuse of public funds and public threats against Marcos, his wife and his cousin, the former House speaker.

Duterte was impeached on the same grounds in 2025, but the Supreme Court blocked it on a technicality before the

senate trial could start.

The case was revived this year. Last week, a House committee that looked into the evidence against the vice-president ruled that there was sufficient grounds to impeach her.

Duterte described the case as “nothing more than a scrap of paper” in a formal written response. She refused to appear in the committee hearings which she said had been politically motivated.

After the impeachment vote on Monday, Duterte’s defence counsel said in a statement that “the burden now rests on the accusers to substantiate their claims” according to the law.

Monday night’s impeachment vote served as a barometer of Marcos’ support in the House. 257 of the 290 lawmakers in attendance voted to impeach Duterte, more than the one-thirds required to advance the case to trial.

But unlike in the House, a conviction in the Senate is uncertain, if a trial does start and runs its course.

In Philippine politics that is dominated by patronage and dynastic alliances, House members, who are elected per legislative district are friendlier to the incumbent president, compared to senators.

The country’s 24 senators are elected on the national level and the Senate is a traditional springboard for those hoping to run for president or vice-president in the future.

In the 2025 mid-term vote, where half of the Senate was elected, candidates allied with Duterte fared better than those who ran under Marcos’ coalition.

But the outcome of an impeachment vote will be difficult to predict under the country’s multi-party system with shifting alliances.

Getty Images Philippine Vice-President Sara Duterte kisses the hand of her father, former president Rodrigo Duterte — *The vice-president’s father is former president Rodrigo Duterte [BBC]*

Duterte announced her intention to run for president in February, much earlier than expected. Marcos is limited by the constitution to a single six-year term.

She holds a 17-point lead over her nearest rival based on a survey in March by Manila pollster WR Numero.

In the 2022 elections, Duterte was the survey frontrunner to succeed her father, but she formed an alliance with Marcos and ran for vice-president instead to consolidate their support bases and fend off a reformist wave. The pair won by a landslide.

But the alliance soon unravelled as they pursued divergent political agendas.

Marcos’ allies in the House, led by cousin, then speaker Martin Romualdez, investigated allegations of fund misuse in Duterte’s office.

At the height of public scrutiny, Duterte hosted a late night online press conference, where she said she told one person that “if I get killed, go kill BBM [President Marcos], [First Lady] Liza Araneta, and [House Speaker] Martin Romualdez”.

Then in March last year, Marcos allowed theInternational Criminal Court to arrest Rodrigo Duterte and detain him at The Hague, where he now awaits trial for crimes against humanity over the hundreds who died in his so-called war on drugs.

***[BBC]***

Foreign News

Car bomb attack and ambush in northwest Pakistan kill at least 21 police

Published

12 hours ago

2026/05/11

Priyan

Workers clear the rubble at the site of an overnight attack on a security post in Fatah Khel, in Pakistan's Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province bordering Afghanistan, May 10, 2026 [Aljazeera]

A car bombing at ⁠a police post, followed by an intense firefight, has killed at least 21 officers ⁠in northwestern Pakistan, according to police and security sources.

An alliance of armed groups known as the Ittehad-ul-Mujahideen Pakistan has claimed responsibility for the attack in Bannu, a district in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province bordering Afghanistan, late on Saturday.

[Aljazeera]

Foreign News

One dead in US after being struck by taking off Frontier Airlines plane

Published

2 days ago

2026/05/10

Priyan

A Frontier Airlines jetliner taxis down a runway for take off from Denver International Airport in Denver, Colorado [Aljazeera]

A person has died after jumping an airport perimeter fence in the US state of Colorado and being struck by a Frontier Airlines plane, according to authorities.

Denver International Airport said the unusual incident occurred late Friday, after the unidentified individual gained access to the tarmac.

It said the “pedestrian jumped the perimeter fence and was hit just two minutes later while crossing the runway”.

A brief engine fire followed the collision, which was put out by emergency responders, according to the airport.

It said that 12 of the 231 people on board suffered minor injuries, with five hospitalised.

The airport said investigators had examined the fence line where the individual entered and “found it to be intact”.

It added that the struck individual “is not believed to be an employee of the airport”.

“We are extremely saddened by this incident and express our sympathies to those involved,” the airport said.

Both local authorities and the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) were investigating the incident.

Airport safety in the US came under renewed scrutiny earlier this year amid a prolonged shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which temporarily left both Transportation Security Agents (TSA) and air traffic controllers working without pay.

While instances of people being killed on airport tarmacs are rare, Friday’s incident came a day after a Delta employee was killed after an airport vehicle struck an airbridge at Orlando International Airport.

In March, two pilots were killed after an Air Canada Express plane crashed into a fire-rescue vehicle at LaGuardia Airport in New York.

About 225,000 people travel through Denver International Airport a day.

[Aljazeera]