 A vast majority of people would agree that any mission going to Mars is the most exciting one happening right now, but I'm a little bit weird. See, if you ask me, an upcoming mission that's going to be going to a cracked ball of ice that just happens to be orbiting Jupiter called Europa may be the most exciting to me because the fiction of Arthur C. Clark is funded and it's about to become a reality in the next decade. This is your space pod for October 16th, 2015. If there was ever the cosmic equivalent of a busted cue ball, it would be Europa, and for most scientists who study the possibility of life off of Earth, it's a place that may have the right conditions right now where life may actually be. Europa is one of Jupiter's four large Galilean moons. Its surface is completely covered in water ice and there's large cracks and fissures that skitter caddy corner across its surface. As Europa orbits around Jupiter, the gravitational influence of both Jupiter itself and the inner Galilean moon Io exert immense tidal forces on Europa. This causes it to be stretched and squeezed, heating the interior enough to cause geothermal energy to be released near the surface. We had two models of Europa, but the bottom one, the ice sitting on top of a liquid water ocean, is the one that we now know to be most accurate. We've even seen potential plumes of water spraying away from the chaos terrain of Europa. That's where the Europa multiple flyby mission comes in. You may have heard of the mission when it was called Europa Clipper, but now that work has actually commenced on it and it's gotten funding, they decided that they needed to be more complicated. It's a pretty neat design, using solar panels instead of an expensive and potentially heavy nuclear battery. Utilizing a rocket like an Atlas 5551, it'll take six years with a Venus Earth Earth Gravity Assist to get it there. A space launch system block one rocket could actually send the spacecraft on a trajectory to Jupiter in what we like to call direct asset, literally from Earth to Jupiter and it would only take 22 months. And that sounds a lot better than me than having to spend six years poking around the inner solar system before you finally arrive at your target. Diving into the strong radiation belts to set up multiple flybys of Europa will degrade the solar panels every time, so each pass of Europa is critical. The Europa multiple flyby mission will perform 45 flybys at altitudes ranging from 2700 kilometers at the furthest and a razor shave of a lowest pass at around 20 kilometers. It's also going to have a suite of instruments. Let's take a look at some of those. Like reason, a radar that'll characterize the structure of Europa's icy crust. E-Themus which will provide imagery of areas where current activity at the surface could be occurring. Several cameras to map Europa at a global resolution of 150 meters. There's even a proposal that several CubeSats will fly on board with some of their own propulsion systems that could put them in orbit around Europa. However, for that to occur the mission would need to be launched in its space launch system configuration. That way it could handle the extra mass of those CubeSats on board. Thanks for watching the Spacepod. I'm Jared Head. Are you as excited for the Europa multiple flyby mission as I am? Tell me in the comments. And also don't forget to like and subscribe to us on social media. And of course we can't do these amazing Spacepods without our patrons that we have on Patreon. So if you'd like to help us continue to deliver these Spacepods for everyone to enjoy and get a better understanding of the universe, throw a little change to us on Patreon and we'll be very glad that you did. So until the next Spacepod, keep exploring.