Characterization of Europa’s Interior through Synthesis of Europa Clipper Data

Europa Clipper will arrive in the Jupiter system in 2030 to explore Jupiter’s moon Europa, where it will investigate the habitability of Europa’s subsurface ocean. Characterizing Europa’s ice shell and ocean through geophysical measurements will enable this overarching goal. We present a methodology to combine static gravity, magnetic induction, gravitational tides, and rotational state and orientation measurements with compositional data to characterize Europa’s hydrosphere, simultaneously constraining the ice shell thickness and the ocean thickness and salinity. We applied this methodology to a large number of plausible interior configurations to simulate a broad range of possible scenarios that Europa Clipper might encounter. The result is a prediction of the interior measurement capabilities of the mission, provided in terms of the quality of the interior recovery from the data. We find that the combination of static gravity, magnetic induction, and tidal response enables a full characterization of Europa’s hydrosphere consistent with Europa Clipper’s requirements. Measuring Europa’s tidal response will be crucial to breaking the degeneracies of the interior models to derive the ocean’s salinity. We predict that Europa Clipper will be able to meet its interior science objectives in the vast majority of cases, with the only outliers being end-member cases where the ice shell or ocean is only a few kilometers thick.