NASA’s Europa Clipper spacecraft launched from Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Monday, Oct. 14. The Europa Clipper mission will conduct a detailed investigation of Jupiter’s moon Europa to determine whether there are places below its icy surface that could support life.
William B. McKinnon, the Clark Way Harrison Distinguished Professor in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, is a member of the Europa Clipper science team and a faculty fellow in WashU’s McDonnell Center for the Space Sciences. He has studied Europa for more than 40 years.
“At Europa, we’re not actually landing yet. But we want to get the full context of things. That means determining whether it has what we think of as necessary for life,” McKinnon told the Source, in a September 2024 interview.
McKinnon can discuss:
- Europa Clipper science goals
- Europa’s ice shell and its interactions with the ocean below
- Europa’s geology
- Mission history
McKinnon is a science team member on three of the Europa Clipper instruments: the Radar for Europa Assessment and Sounding: Ocean to Near-surface (REASON) instrument team (Principal Investigator: Donald Blankenship, University of Texas Austin); the MAss Spectrometer for Planetary EXploration (MASPEX) team (Principal Investigator: Jim Burch, SwRI); and the gravity/radio science team, led by Erwan Mazarico at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.
Read more in this Q&A with McKinnon on the Source website.
Contact Talia.Ogliore@wustl.edu to schedule an interview with McKinnon.
