'Hey Bill Nye, How Will We Search for Life on Jupiter's Moon, Europa?' #TuesdaysWithBill | Big Think

Hi Bill. I'm Olwethu. I'm 16 years old from South Africa. My question is what are the future plans of the Europa trip and what instruments will be utilized to drill beneath the earth's surface?

So, the big news here in the United States is this mission to Europa. Mission is what we call a spacecraft and all the people that work to support it. The mission to Europa is now in phase B. In other words, it's after phase A, so it's been funded. There's money being spent selecting instruments for a spacecraft to go out to Europa, the moon of Jupiter, with twice as much sea water as the Earth.

Looking for signs of life is a tricky business because a spacecraft would be going very, very fast in order to get out there and get in orbit around Europa without just smashing into it. So when you said the Earth's surface, I bet you meant the Europainen surface, the Europian surface.

Along this line, I'm reluctant to call them our hero, but there's a congressman in the U.S. Senate, in the U.S. Congress, named John Culberson. He is a huge fan of sending a mission to Europa. He has a daughter who's 19, I believe, and he wants it so that she will know whether or not there is life on Europa, just like you.

And so he has put in a congressional bill, this is here in the United States, this is the laws and regulations that provide money to NASA, the world's largest space agency. He has put money in there to make a lander for Europa.

In general, the lander would be a thing with insect looking legs and then some drill that gets really hot and melts through the ice. The other plan they talk about is a big long tether, a big cable, so this thing would melt through 20 km of ice, like 15 miles of ice, and look around in the Europainen ocean. It would be an extraordinary thing.

Now this is a cool thing, and we're very excited about it at the Planetary Society. But the drawback is humans being what they are and Congress being what it is here in the U.S. When something that ambitious, or that expensive, or that pricey is put in a bill, what often happens is the other side, the Senate— the U.S. government has two houses, just like lords and commons— the other side will cancel that money set aside.

But we'll see. Either way, there is a mission going to Europa and there is a proposal to make a very sophisticated, complicated lander to look for signs of life below the surface. The extraordinary, and I hope it happens while you're alive. I hope it does. Stay tuned.