Sam Howell: ‘One day we might look for life directly on Europa’

NASA’s Europa Clipper is setting off for one of Jupiter’s icy moons, Europa, to see if it could harbour life. It will perform dozens of close flybys gathering detailed measurements from its suite of sensors to understand the nature of this distant world’s ice shell and the ocean thought to lurk beneath it.

Sam Howell is a project staff scientist on the mission and a planetary interior researcher at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. He tells David Stock why the agency is so keen to take a closer look at Jupiter’s fourth-largest moon, what exactly it is hoping to find there and how the visit could help us figure out the likelihood of life elsewhere in the cosmos.