(Image: Spencer Wilson)
91av has a plan to beat ESA to Jupiter’s moon with our own low-budget CubeSat space probe. We’ll be looking for alien life – who’s in?
WE’RE normally a patient lot at 91av. We know science takes time. Even so, we’ve been reporting on the possibility of life on Europa, Jupiter’s ice-encrusted moon, since the mid-1990s. Now, two decades on, we’re facing another 15 years or more until NASA or the European Space Agency visit it with a spacecraft capable of telling us more.
Frankly, we just can’t wait that long to see what’s out there. So we thought, why wait at all? It’s the 21st century. Who leaves it to governments or international space agencies to fulfil their dreams? This is the age of do-it-yourself, crowdsourced everything. Hence the 91av mission to Europa. You’re welcome.
To the untrained eye, Europa looks like a wildly expensive destination. ESA’s , or JUICE, will make two dedicated fly-bys at an estimated cost of €1 billion. True, that includes a look at Jupiter, Callisto and Ganymede, but still. The price tag on NASA’s proposed mission is just as high.
Given these eye-watering estimates, you might be doubting whether anyone can crowdfund a space mission. Hey, it’s already been done. It’s exactly how more than 2000 space enthusiasts raised upwards of $160,000 to reboot an old NASA solar explorer mission called ISEE-3. It was enough for NASA to hand control of the craft to the rebooters. And not reluctantly, either: in September, NASA issued a report called “” that acknowledged the power of crowdfunding…
