The Mission

by David W. Brown

  The Europa Clipper decision, however, was limited to the planetary science division. The way these things had worked, headquarters might well decide later to fly an orbiter instead. Curt therefore warned the science definition team to be ready for anything. Should Europa Clipper be killed and an orbiter chosen, everyone should be ready to sing with a happy heart the praises of an orbiter and to make the best doggone orbiter mission NASA had ever seen. The idea was to make it hard for NASA to say no to any Europa mission—redundancy of the most exhausting and dissonant sort.

  With a spacecraft concept now sort of chosen, the science definition team reformulated itself as a Europa Science Advisory Group, paring down its membership to the most essential players.454 No such group was strictly necessary, but the consensus from everyone who wasn’t a Jet Propulsion Laboratory engineer was that Jet Propulsion Laboratory engineers made design decisions that sapped spacecraft science. You needed the tension of a science team to keep the engineers honest. Tom Gavin might have been the best in the world at building a spacecraft, but he was not a Europa scholar, and if he had to make a call that would harm the science in the interest of attaining some elegant technical solution, he would go with the technical solution every time and sleep very well that night. So Louise remained chair of the advisory group, and a reinvigorated Bob was back as study scientist.

  Culberson had acquired an almost mythical stature by now among the Europans, who referred to him alternately and endearingly as “Our Benefactor” or “the Buffalo.” Headquarters set aside fifteen million dollars of the congressman’s appropriation to further develop and retire the risks associated with the science instruments composing the spacecraft’s payload.455 Curt called the effort ICEE—Instrument Concepts for Europa Exploration—pronounced like the convenience store staple frozen fruit drink (and don’t think the PowerPoint slides forgot about that: a frozen Europa in a red-and-blue cup).456 And he and the Europa leadership team were insistent that if at all possible, pull from flight-proven hardware. If somebody else built some specific radiation-hardened chip, use that chip. Don’t reinvent wheels and introduce uncertainty. If at all possible, avoid thaumaturgic solutions to technical problems. The Europa Clipper mantra: No miracles.

  THOUGH CURT WAS at the epicenter of the budget clash between Congress and the White House, it was fine. He would deal with it one roll of the rock at a time. Two years earlier, he had learned perspective in the worst way possible. And all of this? He kept a clean desk. He would handle it.

  On January 3, 2011, a combination PET-CT scan had revealed seven small spots on his wife’s lungs.457 Susan had spent the second half of 2010 undergoing radiation and chemotherapy, and the two had hoped these would be the images giving her a desperately deserved all clear. Four days later, however, doctors delivered a diagnosis of cancer—her fourth recurrence in four years. She started a clinical trial of a possible treatment, but Susan was under no illusion about what the recurrence meant. Survival involved sudden trips to emergency rooms, chronic headaches, sensitivity to brightness, dizziness, and nausea.458 Respite meant lying on a bed in a darkened room. Those days were hell.

  But she was also Susan Niebur, the woman who had kicked open the door at NASA headquarters for scientists under the age of eighty; Curt would still be working on hex bolts for aircraft landing gear at Raytheon if not for her! She had helped spark what would be an irrepressible grassroots cultural change at the ossified agency nerve center. She was a mom at home, and a mother to so many careers, and as ever, she had work left to do.

  Soon after diagnosis no. 4, mornings involved visits with lawyers to get her affairs in order, and afternoons were spent watching PBS Kids with her little ones. But she also found time to organize advocacy initiatives for cancer patients; blog prodigiously on her personal online journal, Toddler Planet—hundreds of thousands of words for hundreds of thousands of readers—on parenthood, cancer treatments, reflections on life, love, parenthood, and mortality. Through Women in Planetary Science, which had taken on a life of its own and become a unifying force in the field, online, in the press, in the flesh, she organized talks and meetings, facilitated networking events, and worked to change institutional malpractice that disproportionately affected women. She attended conferences, published papers, spoke on panels, and presented posters. Some days she was bedridden. Some days she celebrated birthdays at bowling alleys with her boys.

  One day, her eldest son noticed the Lego minifig in her office, Princess-Who-Can-Defend-Herself, with the eyeglasses and the sword, and exclaimed: “She’s you! She’s inside you, fighting the cancer!”459 And so she was.

  But time, Susan knew, was short. At the time of her rediagnosis, her youngest had just turned four, and not long after receiving the news, she wrote in her journal: “And every day of my life, I live now for you and your brother. . . . The pain and fear and uncertainty that you’re reading about in these archives—please know always that for you—for you—it was worth it.”460

  Her final blog post described an exchange with her husband, her bed “strewn with children’s toys, books, and an oxygen tank.” We got this far, said Curt, “because of your amazing strength, commitment, and love for your family that you have shown since you were diagnosed.” We got this far, she responded, “because of you, always at my side, supporting me, joking with me, taking me to yet another appointment and holding my hand. Kidding me about the speed I drink the contrast shakes, and raising eyebrows with me as the tech’s hands jiggle as he tries to place the line.”461

  On Wednesday, October 17, 2012, the Division for Planetary Sciences of the American Astronomical Society awarded, posthumously, the prestigious Harold Masursky Award to Susan Niebur “for outstanding service to planetary science and exploration.”462, 463 She had died on February 6, at just thirty-eight years of age. You didn’t even have to know her to feel devastated. A community this small, you felt everything. You lose someone like Susan, and the axis of the Earth felt somehow to wobble slightly. “All that survives after our death are publications and people,” Susan wrote on her blog. It was, she said, her mantra. And when she left, science went on, publications and people supported by the shoulders of one giant more.

  Chapter 15

  Ocean Rising

  CURT’S INBOX CHIMED AT 6:14 P.M. ON DECEMBER 5, 2013, though he didn’t see until later what had arrived. The email was from Kurt Retherford, a senior research scientist at the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, the subject line: “Discovery of Europa’s Water Vapor Plumes.” Curt fumbled with his iPhone, opened the message.

  I’m pleased to inform you about an exciting discovery that will soon be published in Science magazine. Our Roth et al. manuscript is titled “Transient Water Vapor at Europa’s South Pole.” I’m sure you’ll agree that this important finding will have a tremendous impact on the future exploration of Europa as a potentially habitable world.464

  Attached was a PowerPoint file giving the basics. Curt tapped out his response, his thumbs a percussive roll against the snare drum of his smartphone screen:

  This is pretty damn exciting. Can you get me a copy of the paper by any chance? It won’t go any farther than me. And does anyone else at HQ know about this (someone in astrophysics division, for example)?465

  Came the reply:

  No need to curb your enthusiasm! Go ahead and run down the halls of HQ.466

  Curt began reading the ten-page paper: “In November and December 2012 the Hubble Space Telescope imaged Europa’s ultraviolet emissions in the search for vapor plume activity . . .” it said; “. . . statistically significant coincident surpluses of hydrogen,” it said, “. . . and oxygen,” it said; “. . . emissions above the southern hemisphere,” it said; “. . . these emissions are persistently found in the same area over ~7 hours, suggesting atmospheric inhomogeneity,” it said. “They are consistent with two 200 km high plumes of water vapor,” it said.467

  Curt ran down the halls of headquarters. Jim had to know about this. Then the two o
f them ran down the hall together. John Grunsfeld, the associate administrator of the Science Mission Directorate, had to know about this. Then Curt corralled the public affairs officer for NASA headquarters, and within one hour, it was set: the world would know about this.

  Europa had plumes.

  Just like Enceladus. Europa was blowing hundreds-mile-high columns or fans of water vapor directly into space. The phenomenon had long been hypothesized (or at least, really hoped for), but no solid evidence had ever presented itself. The twin spacecraft Voyager on flyby, Galileo at Jupiter for nearly eight years, New Horizons and Cassini during gravity assists, to say nothing of the land and space telescopes looking, looking, looking—scientists going back to the original Galileo had been staring at Europa with one tool or another, from a homemade spyglass of hand-ground lenses pointed from a little patch of Padua, to an orbital telescope with a one-ton mirror—and nobody had ever seen the suspected jets of ocean water.468 Until now.

  The lead authors of the paper were Lorenz Roth of the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, Joachim Saur of the University of Cologne in Germany, and Retherford, also of Southwest Research. They had taken the observations using Hubble’s ultraviolet camera.

  Lorenz led the data analysis that followed.469 That spring, he showed Kurt what he had found, and what he found in November was . . . Europa. But what he found in December was Europa with a big bright blob above its lower limb.

  Well, said Kurt . . . what do we do about that?470

  The group had studied the disc of Europa previously, finding nothing. There was no “scan for water” button on Hubble, and the data were at the hairy edge of what the telescope could do. Lacking a cosmic divining rod, they were looking for “atmospheric inhomogeneity.” What they found this time via Hubble were atoms glowing with light—an auroral process, electrons in Jupiter’s magnetosphere smashing into gases coming off Europa.471 This wasn’t in itself a left field finding. The researchers had seen something similar at Io, and the phenomenon was associated with oxygen molecules. What caused Kurt, Lorenz, and Joachim to gasp and sit up in their chairs was the presence and quantity of hydrogen atoms. The ratio of oxygen and hydrogen glowing at their respective, spectrally characteristic wavelengths was a telltale sign of the two elements being split apart from common molecules by projectile electrons. And the molecules were emerging from the same place: near Europa’s south pole. The men were seeing plumes of water vapor being blasted from inside Europa.

  Roth, Saur, and Retherford didn’t report the results at science conferences, didn’t even hint to colleagues over coffee. Just the opposite: they attacked the data, threw stones at it themselves, because if they got it wrong, they would look like lunatics. So they did everything possible to drill holes in their discovery. They drafted their science paper and even added a long, supplemental appendix outlining everything they had done to really undermine their own ideas.

  Confident at last in their observations and interpretations thereof—but including every caveat and more observations needed disclaimer they could pull from the annals of academia going back to Socrates—they submitted to the journal Science. It wasn’t lost on them that the discovery would have implications for how one went about exploring Europa. If you could fly through its plumes the way Cassini could fly through those of Enceladus, you would eliminate the greatest barrier to Europa exploration: getting through that ice shell. With plumes, you wouldn’t have to find a way to the water. Just as with Enceladus, the water would find its way to you.

  Right after they were accepted by Science, Retherford contacted Curt, knowing he was the lead person doing programmatic planning for outer planets exploration. They weren’t buddies, but, I mean, they had been in the same room before at public meetings and conferences, so he expected Curt would be interested. He didn’t know, however, that Curt would be this interested.

  Here is how NASA alerts the press and informs the public. The agency sometimes does media briefings at science conferences—the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union, the winter meeting of the American Astronomical Society—and those talks tend toward the interesting and in extreme cases, exciting, but don’t necessarily lead to large words on A1.

  Sometimes, however, NASA wants editors at the New York Times and Washington Post to take extra notice. To do this, they hold a press conference at NASA headquarters. A reporter is invited to 300 E Street SW, Washington, DC, and she knows something big is about to happen. The agency doesn’t even consider this sort of summoning unless it sees a reasonable shot at making the front pages of every major paper in America.

  Of course, NASA is a government agency, and so there are procedures to follow and a bureaucracy to appease. Division directors, division public affairs officers, directorate public affairs officers, a science mission directorate editorial board (called, informally, a murder board), the head of public affairs for the entire agency . . . all hoops. If the process glided along unhindered, it would take about a month to make everything happen.

  Curt had one week. The results, he learned, were set to be reported during a talk at the (coincidental) fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union, the largest annual gathering of geologists in the country. Without NASA, the plumes would get good coverage because it was good science, but Curt wanted to bury the needle on this thing. It was terrible timing. It was ideal timing. Everyone would be there: twenty thousand scientists, plenty of press, as well as Roth, Retherford, and Saur presenting their findings. So while plumes survived the murder board for headquarters press conference approval, the venue of the fall meeting was just too perfect. They would throw the press conference there. They would dial this thing to eleven.

  FOR MOST OF Europa’s history, the mission died inside the four walls of NASA headquarters. It died, in fact, on the third floor. Ed Weiler had higher priority projects. On the rare occasion that the associate administrator gave ground, however, and let Europa reach the ninth floor for consideration by the administrator, it died there. The mission was too small. Or too big. Or too expensive. Or overly ambitious. Or insufficiently ambitious. Let’s go to Mars instead.

  Congress, meanwhile, no matter Culberson’s appropriations defiance, would never, ever, ever win over this White House, which was still inflexible in its commitment to earth science and James Webb. Unless: NASA headquarters, from the security guard at the front door to the administrator on the ninth floor, had to be solidly, unambiguously, implacably, persistently, irrepressibly committed to a Europa mission. The administrator would need to walk to the White House, march into the Office of Science and Technology Policy and the Office of Management and Budget and not take no for an answer.

  But the only way to do that—the only way to win over the administrator—the only way, in fact, to make him willing to throw his star on the table if given a no—was to create a story so compelling that it connected emotionally, cerebrally, and spiritually to the White House, despite its misgivings about prioritizing anything that didn’t orbit the Earth. And the story as written, so far, just wasn’t enough. The spacecraft was credible, the science superb, the mission concept ready to come out of the oven, but the whole thing was missing . . . something.

  Then Curt walked into Jim Green’s office with a paper reporting the discovery of plumes on Europa.472

  Jim saw a story coalescing.473 The Space Launch System rocket, announced two years earlier, was making headway. It was the centerpiece of human spaceflight—would eventually be the most powerful rocket ever built by NASA. Jim filed that away mentally. The SLS could get Clipper to Europa in less than three years. Clipper gave SLS somewhere to go. Now, seeing those plumes on Europa, Jim knew: the connection was made. You could take full advantage of everything known about Enceladus, all of Cassini’s evidence, observations, and experiments . . . and fold it in. Just like that! Better still, Europa was much, much bigger than Enceladus. If Enceladus were a golf ball, Europa would be a basketball. Europa was huge!
Something that size blasting an ocean into space—blasting it two hundred kilometers high,474 the height necessary to be seen by a space telescope five hundred million miles away—just imagine how much water vapor was being expelled to hit that altitude? Which meant what was happening at Europa was even more phenomenal than what was happening at Enceladus. And Europa’s ocean was billions and billions of years old: plenty of time to develop life.

  So this press conference would be one of the most exciting things Jim had ever done in his life. Because he knew what would happen when it was over.

  Chapter 16

  Train Driver

  JOAN SALUTE CAME TO NASA FROM PURDUE UNIVERSITY, where she worked as a computer programmer for the Laboratory for Applications of Remote Sensing, which studied things from orbit. She was not a space person per se—I mean, when she was a girl, she joined her family and a thousand other people to watch the Apollo 11 landing from the Wright Brothers National Memorial in North Carolina.475 Park personnel presented the landing on a big bank of television screens outside. Where better to see it? Neil Armstrong even carried on the Eagle a thumb-sized sliver of the Wright Flyer’s propeller and a small swatch of the plane’s wing.476 Joan, eleven at the time, didn’t understand exactly what she was witnessing—the magnitude—but it stayed with her and turned out to be her comic book origin story, her radioactive spider bite. While writing lines of Fortran for the remote sensing lab, she developed a rare skill set: how to process and interpret satellite data. Other universities and government agencies, including NASA, would dial into Purdue’s supercomputers to take advantage of their bit-smashing abilities, and before long, she was training representatives from those institutions in the ways of data analysis. When she moved to California in 1982, she reached out to managers at Ames—a Purdue client—and they offered her a job in its earth sciences division. She started as a contractor and was badged as an agency employee six years later. In 2004 she moved to headquarters, where she worked as the program executive for the Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (but pronounced laddy), a satellite that circled and studied the lunar exosphere and looked for moon dust in space. Seven years later, Jim Green added the Europa Habitability Mission to her portfolio.