Jupiter’s moon, Europa, harbors a liquid water ocean under its icy surface. NASA’s Europa Clipper Mission, set to launch in October 2024, will explore this ocean world with a suite of instruments designed to assess its habitability. I will present the scientific studies that have led to our current understanding of this exciting moon and describe the expected science investigations to be conducted with the Europa Clipper mission following the spacecraft’s arrival to the Jupiter system in 2030.
Dr. Tracy Becker is a planetary scientist at the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, TX. She earned a B.S. in Astrophysics at Lehigh University in 2010 and a Ph.D. at the University of Central Florida in 2016. Dr. Becker is a Deputy Principal Investigator for the Ultraviolet Spectrograph on NASA’s Europa Clipper mission and the Deputy Principal Investigator for the Alice ultraviolet spectrograph on NASA’s New Horizons mission. Her research studies include Hubble and JWST observations of asteroids, satellites, and planetary rings. She has also conducted research on asteroids with radar data from the Arecibo Observatory. Dr. Becker was awarded the AAS Division for Planetary Sciences’ Carl Sagan Medal in 2023.