The ERP (Enceladus Research Probe) Mission
Location
CoLab, OCB 100
Start Date
25-4-2024 1:30 PM
Document Type
Poster
Description
The ERP mission proposes an expedition to search for evidence of life on Enceladus, one of Saturn’s many moons. The goal of this project is to send a lander and an ice and water probe to Enceladus to analyze the thick icy crust for organic compounds as well as the salty liquid ocean beneath the surface where life is likely to exist. The probe’s journey would involve a gravity assist from Jupiter which would take seven to eight years to reach Enceladus. In order to get to the subsurface ocean, we will use a probe, called EnExIceMole, which was designed specifically to drill through the thick icy crust of Enceladus. The type of instrumentation on this craft would include an ultraviolet spectrograph, a thermal emission imaging system, and a mapping spectrometer. The purpose of this instrumentation is to gain information about Enceladus’s composition, create a map of its composition and temperature signature, and to obtain new images of Enceladus.
The ERP (Enceladus Research Probe) Mission
CoLab, OCB 100
The ERP mission proposes an expedition to search for evidence of life on Enceladus, one of Saturn’s many moons. The goal of this project is to send a lander and an ice and water probe to Enceladus to analyze the thick icy crust for organic compounds as well as the salty liquid ocean beneath the surface where life is likely to exist. The probe’s journey would involve a gravity assist from Jupiter which would take seven to eight years to reach Enceladus. In order to get to the subsurface ocean, we will use a probe, called EnExIceMole, which was designed specifically to drill through the thick icy crust of Enceladus. The type of instrumentation on this craft would include an ultraviolet spectrograph, a thermal emission imaging system, and a mapping spectrometer. The purpose of this instrumentation is to gain information about Enceladus’s composition, create a map of its composition and temperature signature, and to obtain new images of Enceladus.
Comments
The faculty mentor for this project was Steven Giambrone and Doug Patterson, Astrobiology.