DENVER ( KDVR ) — A piece of the University of Colorado Boulder is heading to space on Monday morning to join NASA on its mission to look for conditions that support life on a Jupiter moon.
NASA’s Europa Clipper is a spacecraft that carries instruments to help determine if Jupiter’s moon, Europa, has conditions to support life. NASA said these conditions could include liquid water, an energy source, carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and sulfur.
NASA’s Europa Clipper spacecraft will scour Jupiter moon for the ingredients for life
Aboard the spacecraft is a piece of equipment known as the SUrface Dust Analyzer, a $52 million piece of equipment designed and built by a team at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at CU Boulder.
The instrument’s mission on the multi-year trip is to collect and analyze particles from around Europa to see if there’s a potential ocean.
Here’s what it looks like:
While the individual piece is compact, NASA said this is part of nine scientific instruments and a gravity experiment, which ends up being the size of a basketball court when the solar arrays are fully deployed.