Journal Article

Europa Ultraviolet Spectrograph (Europa-UVS)

Kammer, J. A., Marinan, A. D., Rickerson, R., Greathouse, T. K., Winkenstern, J., Nerney, E. G., Giles, R. S., Freeman, M. A., Hendrix, A. R., Roth, L., Velez, M. A., Davis, M. W., Saur, J., Stern, S. A., Persson, K. B., Brooks, S. M., Raut, U., W Siegmund, O. H., Versteeg, M. H., Spencer, J. R., Molyneux, P. M., Gladstone, G. R., McGrath, M. A., Steffl, A. J., Hue, V., Becker, T. M., Retherford, K. D., Perez, B., Pope, S., Ferrell, S., D Mamo, B., Trantham, B. J., Johnson, E.

2024

Overview

NASA’s Europa Clipper mission is designed to provide a diversity of measurements to further our understanding of the potential habitability of this intriguing ocean world. The Europa mission’s Ultraviolet Spectrograph (Europa-UVS), built at the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), is primarily a “plume finder” and tenuous atmosphere investigation. The science objectives of Europa-UVS are to: 1) Search for and characterize any current activity, notably plumes; and 2) Characterize the composition and sources of volatiles to identify the signatures of non-ice materials, including organic compounds, in the atmosphere and local space environment. Europa-UVS observes photons in the 55–206 nm wavelength range at moderate spectral and spatial resolution along a 7.5° slit composed of 7.3°×0.1° and 0.2°×0.2° contiguous sections. A variety of observational techniques including nadir pushbroom imaging, disk scans, stellar and solar occultations, Jupiter transit observations, and neutral cloud/plasma torus stares are employed to perform a comprehensive study of Europa’s atmosphere, plumes, surface, and local space environment. This paper describes the Europa-UVS investigation’s science plans, instrument details, concept of operations, and data formats in the context of the Europa Clipper mission’s primary habitability assessment goals.

• Publisher: Springer Netherlands,Springer Nature B.V,Springer Verlag
• Subject: Aerospace environments / Aerospace Technology and Astronautics / Astrophysics and Astroparticles / Atmosphere / Europa / Europa Clipper / Habitability / Icy moon / Investigations / Jupiter / Jupiter atmosphere / Objectives / Ocean worlds / Organic compounds / Physics / Physics and Astronomy / Planetology / Plumes / Radiation / Science / Sciences of the Universe / Solar occultation / Space Exploration and Astronautics / Space missions / Space Sciences (including Extraterrestrial Physics / Space telescopes / Spatial resolution / Spectrum analysis / Toruses / Ultraviolet spectroscopy / Volatile compounds