Potential Landing Sites: A Comprehensive Reconnaissance Assessment of the Europa Clipper Trajectory
June 2025 • 2025PSJ.....6..142S
Abstract • NASA's Europa Clipper mission will explore Jupiter's icy moon 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 the future, especially 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 ground track 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, which we discuss based on existing studies. We also identify and rank supporting flybys, which are not themselves reconable but provide data for additional characterization of reconable areas. These current rankings demonstrate the process for assessing reconable areas and reflect present-day knowledge. Future decisions on landing site location(s) would be based on new knowledge from Europa Clipper 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.
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