Futurehead.com

A Ph.D. student at Cornell University named Joseph Shoer has designs on Europa, Jupiter’s ice-encased moon. At his Quantum Rocketry blog, he’s thought through all the requirements that a mission to explore the moon would need, complete with sketches of exactly what the robotic landers would look like.

A manned mission to Europa is somewhat impractical. For starters, it’d take about five years for a rocket to reach the moon, with the same amount of time being required for the return journey. Also, once the astronauts arrived, the radiation in the Jovian system would mean that any trips beyond a thick set of shielding would be somewhat on the toasty side.

But Europa, says Shoer, “ought to be one of the highest-priority exploration targets for robotic space probes”, mainly because it’s “one of perhaps two or three extraterrestrial places in the Solar System where we might hope to find life“.