The Woman Who Sent a Spacecraft to Europa

Over at The New Yorker, you can find my coverage of the launch of Europa Clipper, NASA’s flagship to the Jovian system, and the story of one of the scientists who’s spent her career making it happen. A snippet:

Just after noon on Monday, a SpaceX rocket stood on the same launch pad that once sent men to the moon. Hurricane Milton had recently ripped across Florida, whipping up winds of a hundred miles per hour in Cape Canaveral, but now the skies were a featureless blue. From a restricted viewing area not far away, Louise Prockter, a graceful scientist with sandy hair, glanced at a countdown clock and then back at the rocket, which carried her lifework. “Surreal,” she said softly. “This just doesn’t feel real.” There were three minutes until ignition.

Read the rest here.

Update: This morning, NPR’s 1A invited me on to discuss Europa, its ocean, the Clipper mission, and the origins of life. Thank you to host Rupert Allman for the fun conversation.

The Canary Box

For The New York Times, I tell the inside story of the desperate race to save NASA’s flagship mission to Jupiter’s ocean moon. A snippet:

People at NASA headquarters take deep breaths when the words “First Story” appear in their email. Late this spring, Curt Niebur, the lead scientist for flight programs, received such a message.

“You open that email right away,” Dr. Niebur said. “You read it, and then you reply, ‘Thank you for sharing,’ and then you bury your face in a pillow and you howl in terror.”

The matter prompting Dr. Niebur’s apprehension involved Europa Clipper, one of NASA’s most scientifically important missions. The agency’s science division created the “First Story” process to encourage science project staff members to communicate potentially bad news without fear of overreaction by leadership.

This news seemed exceptionally bad. If what Dr. Niebur was reading was true, Europa Clipper was cooked.

NASA had spent more than $5 billion on the planetary probe. It is the largest ever built — as big as a basketball court with its solar arrays extended. The mission’s job is to help scientists on Earth determine the potential habitability of Europa, the moon of Jupiter that is wrapped in a thick shell of ice, beneath which a warm ocean flows with twice as much saltwater as on Earth. Scientists believe it has all the chemical ingredients for alien life to have emerged.

In late May, Europa Clipper was set to be shipped to Florida to prepare for its October flight opportunity. If it missed its launch window, scientists would face a long wait for another shot — if the problem could even be solved.

Across NASA and its affiliate research labs, teams would soon find their summer dominated by a terrifying question: Was Europa Clipper doomed?

Read the rest here. (It will be on newsstands next Tuesday.)

Update: It is today’s “Great Read” —what an honor!

Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Europa Clipper Imperiled

For the New York Times, I reveal details about a critical issue affecting Europa Clipper, NASA’s flagship mission to Jupiter’s ocean moon. From the story:

The equipment issue on the spacecraft could result in a lengthy delay of the mission, Europa Clipper, which NASA classifies as “flagship,” a designation for its most scientifically significant endeavors. Experts say that if the spacecraft launches in October, as scheduled, it may fall short of its scientific objective of assessing whether anything could live on Europa.

At issue is the ability of the transistors, the electric switches that are the building blocks of computer chips and other electronics, to resist the powerful radiation of the Jovian system.

You can read the rest here. And if this subject interests you, perhaps I can interest you in a book about the scientists who spent a decade convincing NASA to fly this mission.

Presenting the Paperback Cover!

I am thrilled and honored to present the cover for the paperback edition of THE MISSION, which lands in bookstores on January 25, 2022! It is now available for pre-order at your local indie bookstore, or on Amazon.

Antarctica, Publishing, and a Few Stories of Other Worlds

Since last I wrote, I joined an expedition to Antarctica for the ICECAP 2019 field season, have published a few things in various outlets, and finished the major edits for my Europa book, now titled THE MISSION. (Its release date has been pushed to January 26, 2021 because of [waves hands at everything].) So it’s been a pretty busy time, and the next few months promise more excitement yet.

For The New York Times, I wrote this story about a small group from NASA that I happened to bump into while in Antarctica. Just to preface this, the ICECAP team, about whom I am writing my next book, spent the field season at Casey Station, a tiny outpost on the east coast of the continent. It is run by the Australian Antarctic Division, and the odds of me bumping into anyone I know are… well to call it astronomical would be understating just how unlikely it would be. You don’t just fly to Antarctica. It’s hard to get permission to go there, dangerous to travel there, and there are scores of stations across the continent (which is bigger than North American) that are well suited for NASA’s purposes, including… I don’t know… American ones!

So one night I’m in the galley with Jamin Greenbaum, my friend and a big part of the Antarctica book to come, and in walks a guy from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where the Europa mission is being built. (To be clear, my next book has nothing to do with space or Europa or any of that.) Who else is there? The great Kevin Hand, one of the world’s foremost Europa scholars.

I can’t even escape that moon while living in the last wilderness on Earth. So the story that I ended up writing was a target of opportunity. The NASA team happened to be there testing an underwater rover they had built, and I joined them for one of its tests. The New York Times piece is the result of that little adventure.

This Robot’s Journey to an Icy Alien Moon Starts Beneath Antarctica
(The New York Times)

CASEY STATION, Antarctica — Near a nice, big hole in the ice and beneath the stone gray, midday Antarctic summer skies, six Adélie penguins stared at six men toiling with tools. The chasm in the ice might have been an inviting entry to the krill-rich waters below. None of the members of the tuxedoed recon party dove into the hole, a square about six feet across. The risk of leopard seals was just too great.

But had they leapt in, the penguins would have discovered not a seal, but a robot.

NASA’s Next Low-Cost Planetary Science Missions Will Visit Venus or the Outer Solar System
(Scientific American)

NASA is set to handle some unfinished business across the solar system, as evidenced by four possible missions it announced yesterday. They are the finalists in the space agency’s Discovery Program competition, a Shark Tank–like face-off in which labs and universities have proposed small, focused spacecraft to explore disparate worlds. More than a dozen ideas, each designed to cost less than $500 million, were submitted to NASA for consideration. Of the four now remaining, only two or perhaps just one will be chosen next year for eventual flight.

“It’s an interesting mix,” says Margaret Kivelson, chair of the Space Studies Board at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. “They are well thought-out missions—and to fascinating objects.” Under consideration are spacecraft that would travel to the Jovian moon Io, the most active volcanic body in the solar system; Venus, considered Earth’s “evil twin” because its environmental conditions are hellish, despite the planet being nearly identical to our own in size, mass and composition; and Triton, a moon of Neptune thought to harbor a subsurface ocean.

Searching for the Key to Life’s Beginnings
(Smithsonian)

Before 1976, when Viking 1 and 2 became the first spacecraft to successfully land and operate on the surface of Mars, the global imagination longed desperately for a red planet that harbored life. The Viking landers were designed to test for microbes, but the real hope, held by even the most jaded planetary scientists, was that NASA’s spacecraft would discover complex life on Mars—something that scurried, or maybe a scraggly shrub. Mars, after all, was our last, best hope after astronomers (and the Mariner 2 spacecraft) forever vanquished the notion of dinosaurs stamping across humid, Venusian bogs. It was Mars or bust; Mercury was just too close to the sun, and beyond the asteroid belt, it was believed, lay a no microbe’s land of gas giants and frozen moons.

The exploration of the solar system since Viking has represented a world-by-world grasping for something—anything—that might suggest life as we know it (or life as we don’t). Today the oceans of Jupiter’s moon Europa are what the swamps of Venus and canals of Mars were for the twentieth century: perhaps the best option for annihilating human loneliness. NASA’s next outer planets flagship mission, Europa Clipper, will attempt to determine the icy moon’s habitability. Some future lander or swimmer will have to find the life if it’s there. The habitable zone of the solar system now includes, potentially, every planet in the solar system. Enceladus and Titan, circling Saturn, are good candidates, as is Triton around Neptune. Like water, life might be everywhere.

A Roundup of Recent Work

It’s been a busy few weeks. Here are a few recent pieces I have had written, and snippets of each.

Neptune’s Moon Triton Is Destination of Proposed NASA Mission
(The New York Times)

Visits to the outer solar system are usually conducted as NASA flagship missions that cost billions of dollars, like the recently concluded Cassini mission to Saturn or the Europa Clipper spacecraft set for launch in the 2020s.

While these projects have produced significant achievements, smaller, less pricey missions also might advance planetary science. On Mars, for instance, no single spacecraft did everything, but in aggregate and over time, the robots sent there revealed the planet’s watery past and set the stage for future astronauts.

That’s why the scientists behind Trident proposal, which will be formally presented to NASA later this month, are seeking support under the agency’s highly competitive Discovery program, for missions that are supposed to cost less than $500 million.

Europa Mission Gets New Instrument to Look for Signs of Habitability
(Scientific American)

NASA is changing one of the key scientific instruments on Europa Clipper, its next major mission to the outer planets of the solar system, and has brought in a scientific luminary to lead it, project leaders announced today. Clipper is set to orbit Jupiter and study Europa, the icy Jovian moon, across multiple flybys. Earlier this month, NASA headquarters terminated the mission’s ICEMAG magnetometer instrument, citing overruns in its estimated budget. The move left the spacecraft without an essential tool to study Europa’s interior ocean, where astrobiologists hope extraterrestrial organisms might be found.

Margaret Kivelson, a professor emerita at the University of California, Los Angeles, will lead the effort to develop a simplified magnetometer to replace ICEMAG. The instrument will measure Europa’s magnetic field and gather data on the ocean’s depth and salinity. Kivelson previously led the magnetometer team on the spacecraft Galileo, which orbited Jupiter in the 1990s. She is credited with discovering the ocean beneath Europa’s ice shell.

How NASA’s Opportunity Rover Made Mars Part of Earth
(Smithsonian)

MER came in the aftermath of failed mission proposals by Ray Arvidson, a professor at Washington University in St. Louis; Larry Soderblom of the U.S. Geological Survey; and Steve Squyres, a professor at Cornell University. Each of the three had been beaten by David Paige of University of California, Los Angeles, whose ill-fated Mars Polar Lander was selected for flight by NASA.

“During an [American Geophysical Union] meeting, I stopped Steve in the hall,” says Arvidson. “I said, ‘I’m a pretty sore loser. How about you?’ And that was the start.” Arvidson, Squyres and Soderblom merged their various teams and set about writing a joint proposal to get a rover on the Martian surface.

NASA Considers a Rover Mission to Go Cave Diving on the Moon
(Smithsonian)

Once it reaches the bottom of the pit, Kerber says, Axel would explore the cavern floor, providing humanity’s first close look at the subterranean realms of the moon. The rover would carry six times as much tether as it needs, so however far the bottom of the cavern is, Axel should be able to descend deeply enough to discover what waits below.

“The bottom of the pit is total exploration. We have enough time to just see what the heck is down there. We are thinking a monolith,” Kerber jokes, “or a big door covered in hieroglyphics.”

Margaret Kivelson Figured It Out

Last week, I had a piece in the New York Times about space physicist Margaret Kivelson, who led the Galileo team that discovered Europa’s subsurface, saltwater ocean. A snippet:

LOS ANGELES — The data were like nothing Margaret Kivelson and her team of physicists ever expected.

It was December 1996, and the spacecraft Galileo had just flown by Europa, an icy moon of Jupiter. The readings beamed back to Earth suggested a magnetic field emanating from the moon. Europa should not have had a magnetic field, yet there it was — and not even pointed in the right direction.

“This is unexpected,” she recalled saying as the weird data rolled in. “And that’s wonderful.”

It would be the most significant of a series of surprises from the Jovian moons. For Dr. Kivelson’s team, the mission should not have been this exciting.

She and her colleagues had devised the magnetometer returning the anomalous data. The instrument’s job was to measure Jupiter’s massive magnetic field and any variations caused by its moons. Those findings were likely to interest space physicists, but few others. Dr. Kivelson’s instrument was never supposed to change the course of space exploration.

And then it did. Dr. Kivelson and her team would soon prove that they had discovered the first subsurface, saltwater ocean on an alien world.

You can read the rest here.

Credit: Image provided by Margaret Kivelson

ONE INCH FROM EARTH Announced

It has been very difficult keeping this news a secret. Thankfully, it has now been reported in Publisher's Marketplace, so here is the announcement:

Brown Gets Close to “Earth” at Custom House

For HarperCollins’s Custom House imprint, Geoff Shandler preempted world rights to David W. Brown’s One Inch from Earth. Brown is a contributor to the Atlantic and the book, which Dunow, Carlson & Lerner’s Stacia Decker represented, is about NASA’s Europa mission (established to launch a spacecraft into the orbit of Jupiter). Custom House said the book features “persevering scientists as its heroes, the planet Mars as the villain, and an unlikely savior in the form of a Tea Party congressman on a mission to find a second Garden of Eden on Jupiter’s moon.”

A lot of hard work went into this. The proposal took a full year to write—longer, in fact, than my last book—and involved more research, interviews, travel, and luck than I ever could have imagined. (There are no shortcuts when doing good work.) Of course, the hard part is yet to come.

My agent, Stacia Decker of Dunow, Carlson & Lerner Literary Agency, is one of the most competent, sharp, and fabulous human beings I've ever had the good fortune of knowing, and she parlayed the proposal into an tremendous book deal with the most exciting imprint in publishing today. (At lot of adjectives in that previous sentence, and every one is accurate.) I am over the moon at the idea of working with Geoff Shandler, who previously edited some of my favorite books ever, including Into the Beautiful North, a masterpiece by Luis Urrea.

Finally, I am honored to write this book and to tell the story of men and women whose work will transform science, philosophy, religion—you name it. One day we will all know their names, and it's a privilege to do my part in making that happen.

(I know this reads like an Oscars speech, but it's a pretty big moment for me, and I intend to live up to expectations.)