Joint Europa Mission (JEM): A Multiscale, Multi-Platform Mission to Characterize Europa’s Habitability and Search for Extant Life

Abstract

Michel Blanc(1), Olga Prieto-Ballesteros(2), Nicolas André(1) , Javier Gomez-Elvira(2), Geraint Jones(3), Veerle Sterken(4,5), William Desprats(1,6), Leonid I. Gurvits (7,16,38), Krishan Khurana(8), Georges Balmino(39), Aljona Blöcker(9), Renaud Broquet(10), Emma Bunce(11), Cyril Cavel(10), Gaël Choblet(12), Geoffrey Colins(13), Marcello Coradini( 14), John Cooper(15), Dominic Dirkx(16), Dominique Fontaine(40), Philippe Garnier(1), David Gaudin(6), Paul Hartogh(17) , Hauke Hussmann(31), Antonio Genova(18), Luciano Iess(18), Adrian Jäggi(4), Sascha Kempf(19), Norbert Krupp(17), Luisa Lara(20), Jérémie Lasue(1), Valéry Lainey(21), François Leblanc(22), Jean-Pierre Lebreton(23), Andrea Longobardo(24), Ralph Lorenz(25), Philippe Martins(26), Zita Martins(27), Jean-Charles Marty(41), Adam Masters(28), David Mimoun(6), Ernesto Palumba(33), Victor Parro(2), Pascal Regnier(10), Joachim Saur(29), Adriaan Schutte(30), Edward C. Sittler(15), Tilman Spohn(31), Ralf Srama(42), Katrin Stephan(31), Károly Szegő(32), Federico Tosi(33), Steve Vance(34), Roland Wagner(31), Tim Van Hoolst(35), Martin Volwerk(36), Jan-Erik Wahlund(41), Frances Westall(37), Peter Wurz(4) Affiliations: (1)IRAP, France ; (2)INTA-CAB, Spain; (3)MSSL/UCL, UK ; (4)University of Bern, Switzerland; (5)ETH Zürich, Switzerland; (6)ISAE, France; (7)Joint Institute for VLBI ERIC, Dwingeloo, The Netherlands; (8)UCLA, USA ; (9) Royal

From planetary exploration goals to technology requirements

“…Several studies have already gone far into this definition, paving the way to a mission that should be ready to fly by the end of the 30's: the NASA Europa Lander SDT report (Hand et al 2017) describes a NASA lander mission with sophisticated payload for the detection of biosignatures in the surface and sub-surface. A white paper submitted to ESA in response to the Voyages 2050 call alternatively described a "Joint Europa Mission" (JEM) between NASA and ESA (Blanc et al 2020(Blanc et al , 2021a) combining an ESA orbiter-carrier with the same NASA lander, complemented by a special ESA sub-platform specializing in the analysis of surface samples in liquid phase. Titan: Understanding the complex world of Titan and its potential habitability is worth several missions, starting with the already selected DragonFly mission.…”