Potential landing sites: a comprehensive reconnaissance assessment of the Europa Clipper trajectory

NASA’s Europa Clipper mission will explore Jupiter’s icy moon Europa via multiple flybys in the early 2030s. The ocean world Europa is one of the most promising locations to search for life elsewhere in the Solar System and thus, Europa Clipper’s main goal is to characterize Europa’s habitability. In future, in particular if Europa Clipper finds that Europa is habitable, a follow-on landed mission may explore Europa’s surface to search for evidence of life. Here we show that 12 of the 49 prime mission Europa Clipper flybys are ‘reconable’, meaning they contain at least one portion of the groundtrack where the requirements for collecting data necessary for terrain relative navigation (TRN) are fulfilled. TRN would be used by a future mission to navigate to a landing site. Using data from the prior Galileo mission, we study what is currently known about these reconable areas, and rank them. Three reconable flybys are ranked highest because of their particular scientific potential. We also identify and rank supporting flybys, which are not reconable themselves but provide data useful for further characterizing the reconable areas. The current rankings demonstrate the process for assessing reconable areas, and reflect our present-day knowledge. Any future final decisions on landing site location(s) would be based on the new Europa-Clipper-based knowledge, and would likely yield different priorities than the current rankings. We conclude that there are areas on Europa with particular scientific interest that Europa Clipper will be able to fully characterize for potential future in-situ exploration.